Blue Mountain achieves record-breaking run

 Los Alamos 11 May 00 Los Alamos' Blue Mountain supercomputer recently set a world record by running 17.8 years of equivalent single-processor computing in just 72 hours. The engineering calculations on the U.S. Department of Energy's supercomputer, analyzed thousands of variables to simulate how well a nuclear weapon and its key components would survive upon impact with the ground. During the three-day period, more than 15,000 engineering simulations that required 10 hours each were executed across 31 of Blue Mountain's 48 SGI Origin 2000 servers, or 65% of the entire machine. Each of the servers contains 128 processors.

The Blue Mountain system, one of the world's fastest supercomputers with a peak speed of 3 Tflop/s, simulates nuclear physics for DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program to ensure the continued safety, reliability and performance of the nation's nuclear stockpile without underground testing.

The United States suspended underground nuclear testing in 1992 and established the Stockpile Stewardship Program in 1995 to continuously monitor the condition of America's nuclear weapons stockpile, assess the findings, and perform maintenance and refurbishment as needed. A key component of DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program is the ASCI initiative, designed to accelerate the development of the computational power DOE scientists and engineers need to simulate the complexities of thermonuclear explosions.

DOE's goal through the ASCI program is to meet the Stockpile Stewardship Program's requirements by building a 100 Tflop/s supercomputer with thousands of processors working in tandem by 2004. Working toward that goal, DOE awarded SGI a $120 million contract in 1996 to build the 3 Tflop/s Blue Mountain supercomputer and advanced graphics system.

At Los Alamos, the team performing the calculations was headed by Lance Hill and Dick Macek, both of the Engineering Analysis Group in the Engineering Sciences and Applications Division. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy.

ASCI Blue Mountain is powered by 48, 128-processor commercial, off-the-shelf Origin 2000 servers and two 128-processor, 16-pipe Silicon Graphics Onyx2 graphics supercomputers with the InfiniteReality graphics subsystem.

Hibbitt, Karlsson & Sorensen, Inc., of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, vendor for ABAQUS software, loaned Los Alamos National Laboratory over 4,000 licenses to perform the large-scale computational experiments on the Blue Mountain system. ABAQUS software is used throughout the world to simulate the physical response of structures and solid bodies to load, temperature, contact, impact and other environmental conditions.

The ASCI Blue Mountain simulations were performed using the commercial ABAQUS/Explicit finite element analysis (FEA) software, which provided a three-dimensional geometry representation that included over 30,000 elements, 100 contact pairs, and multiple nonlinear material descriptions. Each calculation required 10 hours on an SGI 250 MHz R10000 processor to simulate 15 milliseconds of weapon response time after impact.

 

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