Experts at Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., Mexico are providing supercomputer power to simulate nuclear weapons to maintain confidence in the nation`s nuclear arsenal without the need to detonate atomic weapons.
Scientists at the laboratory are continuously upgrading their supercomputer complex in what they call a race to create the conditions under which the United States would enter a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which would permanently ban all nuclear tests.
The finish line in this race, they estimate, is 100 teraflops of computing power - a single teraflop is one trillion computer instructions per second - by the year 2004.
Their solution is the Cray Origin 2000 server from Silicon Graphics Computer Systems in Mountain View, Calif. The end product is known as Blue Mountain, the world`s highest-sustained-performance supercomputer, which technicians are assembling now in modules at Los Alamos.
Blue Mountain is organized into 48 128-processor shared-memory multiprocessors interconnected by 36 16-port high- performance parallel interface (HIPPI) switches. According to Los Alamos scientists, Blue Mountain will have 75 terabytes of high-performance Fibre Channel disk, making it the largest "disk farm" ever assembled for one computer.
Furthermore, "all of our components are commercial off the shelf...This approach is a departure from the one traditionally used by high performance vendors," says Derek Robb, Silicon Graphics manager for the program - J.R.
For more information about the Origin 2000 servers, contact Silicon Graphics by phone at 650-933-7777, by fax at 650-932-0737, by post at 2011 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, Calif. 94043, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.sgi.com/.
