A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 4
September 2007
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World’s Fastest Supercomputer Delivers Breakthrough Science Simulations for the NNSA’s Nuclear Weapons Program
The BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
topped the list of the world’s fastest computers for the sixth time, according to the new Top500 list released Wednesday, June 27, at the
International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
Built by IBM, BlueGene/L (BG/L) clocks in at 280.6 teraFLOPS (trillion floating operations per second) on the LINPACK, the industry standard for supercomputer performance. BGL is a workhorse machine for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) effort to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without underground nuclear testing, known as the Stockpile Stewardship Program.
NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program’s 100 teraFLOPS Purple system, another IBM machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dropped from fourth to sixth on the Top500 list.
“Since BG/L went into production in early 2006, it has performed beyond our expectations and delivered for the ASC Program. BG/L’s architecture has proven suitable for a much broader range of applications than originally envisioned,” said Dona Crawford, Associate Director for Computation. “Likewise, ASC Purple also has demonstrated the system’s ability to deliver weapons simulations of unprecedented spatial resolution for the Stockpile Stewardship Program.”
The detailed computer simulations of nuclear weapons performance produced by the ASC Program using BG/L, ASC Purple, and other supercomputers at the three nuclear weapons labs are a cornerstone of stockpile stewardship. ASC is a tri-lab program uniting the high-performance computing expertise of NNSA’s Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national labs.
BG/L’s three year reign as the world’s fastest supercomputer has seen significant progress in code development and the achievement of numerous milestones for NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program. For example, simulations on BGL helped answer critical questions about plutonium aging—a key to understanding the life expectancy of nuclear weapons systems. Breakthrough calculations/simulations run on the machine have over the last two years garnered three Gordon Bell Prizes, widely regarded in the computing community as the Oscars of high-performance computing.
Simulations on BG/L of high explosives, super-ionic water, and graphite-to-diamond experiments have provided scientific insights and/or confirmed results of earlier physical experiments. Livermore scientists used BG/L to perform the first instability simulation with a Reynolds number large enough to determine the nature of turbulence beyond the mixing transition, a feat that made the cover of Nature Physics magazine in August 2006.
In June 2006, BGL set a new world mark for a scientific application with a sustained performance of 207.3 teraFLOPS on the “Qbox” computer code for conducting materials science simulations. This represents a leap forward in scientists’ capability to perform predictive simulations of large, complex high-Z metals relevant to stockpile science and was awarded the 2006 Gordon Bell Prize for peak performance.
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