IBM Delivering World’s Fastest Computer to Livermore Lab
The world’s fastest computer is on its way to the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, east of San Francisco, where it will be spread over an area the size of two basketball courts while pondering nuclear weapons.
The potent machine--costing $110 million--is the latest in a series of government-funded supercomputers, each designed to be about three times as fast as its predecessor. Named ASCI White, it is traveling to Livermore on 28 tractor-trailer trucks. IBM officials are expected to announce the milestone today.
At its new home, the IBM computer will work on complex tasks for the Department of Energy, especially the simulation of nuclear weapons blasts. That mission was set out five years ago when the government began funding the supercomputer program known as ASCI, for Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative.
ASCI followed a 1992 U.S. moratorium on nuclear tests and a push by President Clinton for a global ban on such weapons testing. That left the Energy Department scrambling to ensure the reliability and safety of thousands of aging nuclear bombs that constitute the nation’s permanent nuclear stockpile without periodic testing.
Federal officials want ever more powerful computers to solve complex mathematical models that attempt to predict nuclear reactions. At issue is not only whether bombs--some decades old--will detonate, but whether their plastic explosives and radioactive components will produce the expected nuclear yields. IBM said ASCI White will be twice as fast as an Intel machine, ASCI Red, at Sandia National Labs, by the standards used in the best-known world survey of computing performance. IBM’s last machine for Livermore came in second on the most recent Top 500 world list, which was issued this month.
ASCI Red broke the 1 trillion operations per second barrier in 1996, sparking a rivalry, and IBM said the latest increase gives it the power to conduct 12.3 trillion operations at peak.
“The limits of what you can do are often constrained by the scale of the system,” said IBM Vice President Dave Turek. “Instead of modeling part of the problem, now you can model the whole problem.”
ASCI White can sustain a pace of 3.8 trillion operations a second, compared with 1.2 trillion for its Livermore predecessor, Blue Pacific, IBM said.
“This level of computing power has never been achieved anywhere. It will open new horizons in scientific computing as we approach our goal to simulate the aging and operation of a nuclear weapon,” said David Cooper, chief information officer at Lawrence Livermore.
IBM said other projects using the supercomputer would include efforts to improve global weather models, economic risk models and pharmaceuticals tailored to individual genetic profiles.
The machine is lashed together from 512 “nodes,” each of them an RS / 6000 server, which is typically used to manage smaller computers. Turek said the company had to install faster switches, reconfigure the architecture and make software improvements to counter problems with scale.
Some of those enhancements will filter down this year to the entry-level RS / 6000, which starts at a more modest $212,000, Turek said.
IBM has been using some of its mainframe expertise trying to take ground from Sun Microsystems in high-end servers used to run big Web sites.
On Wednesday, IBM’s software side said it plans to hire 2,000 people and spend more than $2 billion in the next two years to expand its design and sales of programs to run Web sites.
IBM said it will invest $1 billion this year and hire 1,000 developers and salespeople. It will spend at least $1.1 billion next year and hire an additional 1,000 people.
Worldwide sales of Web site software will expand to $9 billion in 2003 from $1.64 billion this year, according to Giga Information Group. IBM is second in the market with 16%, half of BEA Systems Inc.’s share, Giga said.
IBM shares rose $4 to $113.69 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
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Bloomberg News contributed to this story.
