A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
March 2009
NA-ASC-500-09—Issue 10
Return to this issue’s stories
NNSA Awards IBM Contract to Build Next Generation Supercomputer
Two new IBM supercomputing systems will help continue to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent. Sequoia will be a 20 petaFLOPS system based on future BlueGene technology, with delivery in 2011 and deployment in 2012. An initial delivery system, Dawn, a 500 teraFLOPS BlueGene/P system, is being delivered and installed. Dawn will lay the applications foundation for multi-petaFLOPS computing on Sequoia.
Sequoia is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world and will be approximately 10 times faster than today’s most powerful system. To put this into perspective, if each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.
The Sequoia systems will be located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and be focused on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running very large suites of complex simulations called uncertainty quantification (UQ) studies. In addition, the machines will be used for weapons science calculations necessary to build more accurate physical models. This work is a cornerstone of NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship program to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile today and into the future without underground testing. http://nnsa.energy.gov/defense_programs/index.htm
Sequoia will have 1.6 petabytes of memory, 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million cores. Though orders of magnitude more powerful than such predecessor systems as ASC Purple and BlueGene/L, Sequoia will be 160 times more power efficient than Purple and 17 times more so than BlueGene/L.
“Sequoia represents an extremely bold step in simulation for the ASC Program. We have, in the past, explored, matured, and exploited high-performance computers to build the 3D codes and do our day-to-day work as efficiently as possible,” said Michel McCoy, head of LLNL’s ASC program. “To tackle the challenges of predictive simulation we face today requires us to build better science models and quantify uncertainty in our integrated calculations. To do this, we need a Sequoia-class system. Never before have we taken an advanced HPC architecture system and proposed to inject it into a mainline production environment at this scale. We will work closely with our customers and collaborators at all three labs to move the critical codes onto this multicore architecture.” For more information, see the NNSA press release.
DOE Privacy Disclaimer | Sandia Privacy Disclaimer |
Developed and maintained by Sandia National Laboratories for NA-121.2