A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NA-114, NNSA Defense Programs
December 2007
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue
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Expanded BlueGene/L Retains Rank as World’s Fastest Supercomputer
BlueGene/L retained its number one ranking on the new Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers at the international Supercomputing 2007 conference in Reno, Nevada. BlueGene/L clocked 478.2 teraFLOPS on LINPACK, the industry standard measure of high-performance computing. Recently expanded to accommodate the growing demand for high-performance systems able to run the most complex nuclear weapons science calculations, BlueGene/L now has a peak speed of 596 teraFLOPS.
The NNSA BlueGene/L supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was named the world’s fastest computer for a seventh straight time, according to the Top500 list released November 2007.
The BlueGene/L system was formerly housed in 64 cabinets arranged in eight rows. The new system is housed in 104 cabinets in 13 rows with an expanded node count of 106,496 (up from 65,536) and an expanded processor count of 212,992 (up from 131,072). The total memory of the system increased from 32 tebibytes to 68 tebibytes with the addition of nodes with twice the memory.
“Expanding the BlueGene/L system allows us to explore a new class of applications important to our mission and is an important step toward the predictive, fully integrated 3D weapons calculations vital to NNSA’s stockpile stewardship mission,” said Michel McCoy, head of the ASC Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The BlueGene/L upgrade, most notably the additional memory, allows scientists from the three nuclear weapons laboratories to develop and explore a broader set of applications than the single package weapons science oriented work that has been the mainstay of the machine in the past. For example, BlueGene/L had been used widely for materials science calculations such as assessing materials at extreme temperatures and pressures. Now it will be much easier to run more complex applications related to modeling integrated systems as opposed to focused exploration of one area of physics or chemistry.
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