DOE announces ASCI contract
BALTIMORE — Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham on Tuesday announced
that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has won the $290
million, multi-year contract to build the two fastest supercomputers in
the world for the Department of Energy.
Named "Purple" and "BlueGene/L," both systems will
be delivered in fiscal year 2005 to the department’s National Nuclear
Security Administration’s (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing
(ASCI) program to take science-based stockpile stewardship into its next
phase. Both Purple and BlueGene/L will be housed at the Laboratory.
Abraham made the special announcement at the 2002 SuperComputing Conference
in Baltimore, the first such visit by an Energy secretary. Linton Brooks,
acting administrator of NNSA, and Nick D’Onofrio, senior vice president
of technology and manufacturing for IBM, joined the secretary for the
announcement. Director Michael Anastasio, Executive Officer Ron Cochran,
and ADs Dona Crawford (Computation) and Bruce Goodwin (Defense & Nuclear
Technologies) also attended.
"ASCI Purple and BlueGene/L promise to deliver cost-effective, tremendous
capability to the Stockpile Stewardship Program’s critical mission
to assess and certify the safety, security and reliability of our nation’s
nuclear deterrent without underground nuclear testing," Abraham said.
"With our world-class scientists at the national defense laboratories
teaming with leading U.S. industrial and academic partners, we assure
continued confidence in our nuclear stockpile.
"The continued success of the Stockpile Stewardship Program requires
advanced computing and experimental capabilities to gain unprecedented
understanding of the health of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and the effects
of aging and parts replacement over time," Abraham noted. "This
program partners the U.S. government and the U.S. industry to bring advanced
computer technology to the marketplace and help solve pressing national
issues, not only involving nuclear weapons, but also in areas of homeland
defense, global diseases and weather prediction."
The two systems will have more than one-and-a-half times the combined
processing power of all 500 machines on the recently announced TOP500
List of Supercomputers. The first system — called ASCI Purple —
will be the world’s first supercomputer capable of 100 teraflops,
almost three times faster than the most powerful computer in existence
today.
This supercomputer represents a fifth-generation system under the ASCI
Program. ASCI Purple will serve as the primary supercomputer in ASCI.
The Stockpile Stewardship Program will rely on ASCI Purple to simulate
the aging and operation of U.S. nuclear weapons, ensuring the safety and
reliability of the nation’s stockpile without underground testing.
The second supercomputer, a research machine called Blue Gene/L, will
employ advanced semiconductor and system technologies based on new architectures
being developed in the ongoing partnership between IBM and DOE for the
government’s ASCI Program. When completed, Blue Gene/L will have
the peak performance of 360 teraflops with 130,000 processors running
Linux. It will have the capability to process data at a rate of one terabit
per second, equivalent to the data transmitted by 10,000 weather satellites.
Blue Gene/L will develop and run a broad suite of scientific applications
including the simulation of very complex physical phenomena of national
interest, such as turbulence, biology, and behavior of high explosives.
"This is a vital step in providing the resources to develop high-fidelity,
three-dimensional simulations to predict the behavior of aging nuclear
weapons for our national security," said Brooks. "The combination
of meeting nuclear stewardship demands and enabling scientific and computational
research at unprecedented scales is truly significant."
Both Purple and BlueGene/L will be a shared resource for all three national
defense laboratories: Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national
laboratories.
"I was very pleased the secretary came to the supercomputing conference
to make this announcement," said Director Michael Anastasio.
"ASCI Purple will continue a very successful partnership between
IBM and Livermore, building on significant success of IBM’s ASCI
White and ASCI Blue Pacific machines. Over eight times larger than ASCI
White, the Purple machine will provide scientists at Livermore and at
other NNSA laboratories with much-needed and unprecedented levels of supercomputing
capability, to meet demanding stockpile deliverables for the Department
of Defense."
Crawford noted that Secretary Abraham’s visit to SuperComputing 2002
in Baltimore was the first by a Cabinet level officer to the annual gathering
of the international super computing community.
"Secretary Abraham’s visit brought out a huge crowd and generated
a great deal of excitement about the role of supercomputing in national
security and science research," she said. "Throughout the convention
center halls, people were stopping us to congratulate us about ASCI."