ASCI White 

Livermore Lab Unveils Supercomputer 

Brian Bergstein / AP 15aug01

ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore

ASCI White
at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab
AP/Ben Margot

ASCI White will possess more than 160 trillion bytes of IBM disk storage capacity, holding 16,000 times more data than the average desktop PC. At a peak computational performance of 12.28 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second, it could simultaneously process web transactions for every man, woman, and child on the planet in one minute. 

ASCI White is a 512-node RS/6000 SP, 1000 times more powerful than the "Deep Blue" supercomputer that defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in a celebrated 1997 match, and capable of solving in one second what a human being with a calculator would need 10 million years to figure out. The new RS/6000 SP requires more than a little space to house the 2,000 miles of copper wiring contained in the microprocessors needed for its demanding tasks -- an area the size of two basketball courts, in fact.

source: IBM 15aug01

LIVERMORE, CA  -- After keeping the world's most powerful supercomputer to themselves for a year, government researchers showed off the $110 million wonder Wednesday and said it might help save the world from nuclear war.

With the ability to perform 12.3 trillion calculations a second, the supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory mainly will be used to simulate how the nation's aging nuclear weapons arsenal would function if launched.

Those simulations must be as precise as possible because the United States suspended underground nuclear tests in 1992.

Gen. John Gordon, the Department of Energy's under secretary for nuclear security, called the supercomputer the ``key to the country's mission of maintaining the stockpile'' and assuring nuclear deterrence.

The supercomputer — known as Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative White, or ASCI White — has a mind-boggling amount of other uses, say researchers who use it.

ASCI White is roughly as powerful as 50,000 desktop computers. It can store the equivalent of 300 million books, or six Libraries of Congress.

It has 8,192 microprocessors, housed in a series of black refrigerator-sized boxes linked together by 83 miles of wiring in a room the size of two basketball courts.

A giant air-conditioning system that cools ASCI White requires three megawatts of electricity, enough for a small city.
mindfully.org note: There's no mention of the power requirement for the computer itself, just the air conditioning system.

ASCI White was designed for the government by IBM Corp., which delivered it to Livermore last year in 28 tractor-trailers. The mammoth computer is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997.

The machine is networked to researchers at Livermore and the Sandia and Los Alamos national labs in New Mexico via an encrypted line. It went through months of testing and debugging before being dedicated Wednesday.

Tomas Diaz de le Rubia, a materials program leader at Livermore, marveled at how ASCI White has enabled his team to create three-dimensional models that can track the behavior of 1 billion atoms at once.

``It opens up a whole new way of studying how materials behave, how they perform under different conditions, how they age,'' he said. ``It's beautiful.''

It's also just the beginning. The government says that to certify the nuclear arsenal with full confidence, it needs a supercomputer that is 10 times as powerful as ASCI White by 2004.

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