Energy Department's Blue Mountain goes for the top position

"SGI's Blue Mountain is the world's fastest computer and can generate fantastically large amounts of information," said Steve Younger, Associate Lab Director for Nuclear Weapons at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. "But once you have trillions of bits of information, you also need the world's most powerful visualization engines to extract knowledge from that data and see it in three dimensions."

Silicon Graphics has coupled into Blue Mountain the most advance graphics system in the world, with technology similar to that of the SGI computers used to create the animated scenes in Antz and other motion pictures. With this visualization system, answers to complex scientific problems that would have taken weeks or more to display can now be displayed in minutes.

The Blue Mountain computer will give weapons scientists improved scientific tools to analyze the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. During 1999, Blue Mountain is expected to execute 80 million trillion operations over the course of thousands of simulations relating to the nuclear stockpile. This is roughly 10 times more computing than all the calculations executed in support of the U.S. stockpile from the development of the first atomic weapon under the Manhattan Project through 1992, the last year of underground testing.

The Department of Energy is developing five generations of high-performance computers as a part of its stockpile stewardship program with a goal of reaching 100 Tflop/s by 2004. Blue Mountain is the second of two DOE computers built with a peak speed of at least 3 teraOps. The first, Pacific Blue -- developed by IBM and located at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- has not yet been tested on Linpack. The Silicon Graphics Blue Mountain and the IBM-designed Pacific Blue systems use different computer architecture/system designs to reach these high speeds. Both computers were completed ahead of schedule and on budget.

At the heart of Blue Mountain are 48 commercially available Silicon Graphics Cray Origin2000 servers containing a total of 6,144 processors. Blue Mountain is organized into 48, 128-processor shared memory multi-processors, or SMPs. The system is designed so the cluster of 48 SMPs -- all commercially available servers -- behave like a single computer. These 48 SMPs can communicate with each other at world-record sustained speeds in excess of 650 Gbyte/sec Blue Mountain's 128-processor, 16-pipe Onyx2 InfiniteReality visualization capability is especially valuable because it is an integral part of Blue Mountain, not a separate unit. This visualization capability is twice that of the former record-holding visualization supercomputer, another system developed by Silicon Graphics.