ASCI Blue Pacific can bring IBM on first position in TOP500

Washingthon, 28 October 98 The The Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has inaugurated its new ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer developed with IBM. The $94 million 5,856 processor machine with 3.8 Tflop/s peak, being currently the fastest machine in the world, could bring IBM to the first place of the TOP500.

The machine has 2.6 Tbytes of memory and consists of1,464 nodes and has a power consumption of 486,000 watts and takes 900 m² of floor space.

The machine was delivered three months ahead of schedule.

The DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative - or ASCI - is a 15-year program designed to accelerate advancement of the technology necessary to numerically simulate nuclear devices eliminating the need for physical testing. In the next phase of the ASCI initiative, IBM will deliver a 10-Tflop/s RS/6000 SP to the DOE in mid-2000.

IBM has sold over 5000 SP systems to date.

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