Supercomputer Monitors Nukes With 11-TFLOPS Speed

Los Alamos National Laboratory has a new guard on the watch, and he's pretty fast. Designed by Linux Networx, the Lightning Linux cluster has a theoretical peak of 11.26 trillion operations per second (TFLOPS). This system will support the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASCI), which helps ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile in the absence of underground testing. Housed in the Metropolis center for Modeling and Simulation, it ranks among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

ASCI's computers run 3D codes that simulate the physics involved in a nuclear detonation. Using these, researchers can integrate past weapons test data, materials studies, and current experiments in simulations of unprecedented size. Los Alamos will use Lightning principally for smaller, more numerous computing jobs in the Stockpile Stewardship workload, such as weapons code development, verification, and validation. Lighting includes 2816 Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, making it the first 64-bit Linux supercomputer in the ASCI program. For more information, go to www.Inxi.com/news/lightning_info.php or www.lanl.gov.