January 2007
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Successful Completion of ASC Purple Integration Impresses Review Panel

The fiscal year 2007 Level 1 Milestone to provide a 100-teraFLOPs platform environment supporting the tri-laboratory Directed Stockpile Work and Campaign simulation requirements was met with flying colors, as determined by a nine-member review panel composed of representatives from academia, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) tri-laboratory community.

The panel, chaired by Professor Paul Woodward, University of Minnesota, met at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to review the milestone on December 14 and 15, 2006. After the review, the panel declared in its initial report that the milestone had been successfully completed. A written panel report will be submitted to the Department of Energy for concurrence. Following are some selected comments from the panel’s initial report:

  • The panel was extremely impressed by the successful completion of the Purple integration, user support, and getting the system into use by the ASC community.
  • End-to-end tri-lab user tests showed a high level of user satisfaction.
  • The stability and reliability of the system are clearly very good.
  • The quality of user support appears to be outstanding.
  • The LLNL team deserves special accolades for accomplishing all this while at the same time bringing up the BlueGene/L system in the same building.
  • The excellent team at LLNL did such a fine job of integrating the Purple system and making it available for productive use that the committee spent much of its deliberative time formulating suggestions for work that goes beyond the requirements of this Level 1 milestone.

See the Livermore ASC Web site for more information about ASC Purple.