Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has dedicated the ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer, built by IBM, Armonk, NY, while previewing an even more powerful 10-teraOPS system, ASCI White. Blue Pacific is part of DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computer Initiative or ASCI Program, and will be used for maintaining the safety, reliability, and performance of the nation's nuclear stockpile.

This massive supercomputer, using an IBM RS/6000 SP with IBM PowerPC 604e processors, can run nearly four trillion floating operations per second, while applying 5,856 processors in parallel to a single problem. Nearly five miles of cable and connecting hardware are used in an area covering 8,000 square feet. Meanwhile, Star Bridge Systems, Inc., Draper, UT, is expecting to deliver their first hyper-computer, based on an architecture employing Field Programmable Gate Arrays, in February 2000. (FPGAs were last mentioned here as applied to the brain of a robot cat, DFX, Sept.99.) An example of their devices, nicknamed HAL, would be the HAL-300GrW1, which runs 12.8 teraOPS on just 280 FPGAs. The unit draws just 1600 watts of 110 VAC power, and occupies 3.78 cubic feet of real estate. SBS is also introducing their VIVA software, which can be applied to programming FPGAs from any manufacturer.