ASCI White exceeds 10 Tflop/s barrierLivermore 15 August 2001 The U.S. Government dedicated the world's fastest supercomputer, an IBM system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that will bring the nation an important step closer to the goal of simulating a nuclear detonation inside a computer. The IBM machine, known as ASCI White, is capable of 12.3 Tflop/s more than the combined speed of the next three most powerful supercomputers on earth. Located in a classified area at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ASCI White covers a space the size of two basketball courts and weighs 106 tons. It contains six Tbyte of memory, and has more than 160 TByte of disk storage.
Developed by IBM under the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA)
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Partnership, the system
delivers 23% more power than was required in IBM's contract with the Department
of Energy (DOE).
ASCI White helps scientists maintain the safety and reliability of the U.S.
nuclear stockpile by simulating in three dimensions the aging and operation of
nuclear weapons. Accurate computer simulation is essential to retain confidence
as the stewardship of world's most complex arsenal transitions to a new
generation of scientists and engineers that has neither designed nor tested a
nuclear weapon.
The simulations are expected to be viewed on IBM's T220, the world's
highest-resolution flat-panel monitor, with 200 pixels per inch and more than 9
million pixels in total on its 22.2-inch screen. The T220's screen depicts 12
times more detail than current monitors, displaying images with a degree of
accuracy not previously possible.
The NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program was developed in
response to a directive from former President Clinton. It integrates the efforts
of the three NNSA national laboratories: Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia.
The ASCI project calls for a series of supercomputers -- 1, 3, 10, 30 and 100
teraflops in size -- to be built over a period of several years. A teraflop is a
trillion calculations per second.
ASCI White marks a breakthrough in computing. Ranked at number one of the
world's TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers the
supercomputer system is the first computer to exceed the double-digit teraflop
speed barrier, a feat once thought impossible by computer scientists. IBM also
designed and built an earlier system in the ASCI series -- ASCI Blue Pacific --
capable of nearly 3.9 Tflop/s.
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