Model simulations

Model simulations provide daily Arctic ocean and sea-ice concentrations (%) to track global warming

Roadrunner Procurement Team members earned a Distinguished Performance Award for their outstanding leadership, tenacity, and perseverance in getting the contract awarded for the Roadrunner advanced supercomputer system. Scheduled for final delivery in 2008, Roadrunner will have a potential peak speed of 1 petaflop—or a thousand trillion calculations per second.

This team, in cooperation with the Laboratory’s Procurement Office, managed the contractual procurement of the Roadrunner system from IBM. The contract is the largest Laboratory computer procurement and one of the largest overall Lab procurements since the Q Machine was purchased more than seven years ago. In addition, the project began under University of California management and had to be completed through the change of management to Los Alamos National Security, LLC. In spite of such massive changes, the request for proposal and contract award were completed in record time, between March and September 2006. If all options on the RFP are exercised, this procurement will cost $115 million over several years.

The Roadrunner procurement is of great importance to the Laboratory’s ASC program and to the Laboratory as an institution. It will also support the Laboratory’s Stockpile Stewardship mission, both at Los Alamos and in the other Department of Energy weapons labs. The Roadrunner base system already has been integrated into the Lab’s secure computing environment to support the annual assessment of weapons systems and the closing of high-priority system issues.