A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 3
May 2007
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Critical Decision-0 Approved for ASC Sequoia Supercomputer
The Critical Decision Mission Need Package (CD-0) for the new ASC Sequoia supercomputer was approved and signed on April 23, 2007, by Marty Shoenbauer, acting NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs. CD-0 approves the NNSA mission need for Sequoia, a new uncertainty quantification (UQ)-focused computer system to be delivered in 2011. The CD-0 package contains a mission need statement, business case, and preliminary project execution plan. It represents the initiation stage of project management activities for Sequoia.
Approval of CD-0 paves the way for the Sequoia project to proceed into definition and execution phases, where the next steps will be to create an industry request for proposal (RFP), evaluation of responses, vendor selection, and contract award. The current Sequoia project schedule calls for approval of Critical Decision 1 (CD-1 Conceptual Baseline Package) and RFP release in September 2007, approval of Critical Decisions 2 and 3 (CD-2/3 Combined Performance Baseline and Construction Readiness Packages) in December 2007, and a contract award early in 2008.
To meet its NNSA and ASC missions, the Sequoia system plans to provide at least 12 times the sustained performance of ASC Purple (sited in 2006) on integrated design code calculations, and 20 times the performance of BlueGene/L (sited in 2005) on a weapons science materials calculation. The Sequoia platform and its implementation project are named after the California redwood trees that are the tallest and largest in the world.
In addition to the expected 2011 final system delivery, the Sequoia contract will provide a smaller but significant initial delivery platform (called Dawn, a fast-growing redwood) beginning in 2008 to permit needed scaling and code development to ensure effective use of the final Sequoia platform. This initial delivery Dawn system is expected to have 10–20 percent of the processor count of the 2011 system and will be used for several demanding near-term programmatic deliverables, in particular to support UQ and “knob” elimination.
Fundamental benefits of Sequoia are agile design and responsive certification infrastructure, increased accuracy in material property data, improved models for understood physical processes known to be important, meeting of programmatic requirements for uncovering missing physics, and improvement of the performance of complex models and algorithms in design codes. All are necessary to achieve predictive simulation in support of transformation, and all are aligned with requirements of the ASC Roadmap and the NNSA Predictive Capability Framework.
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