Newest supercomputer coming to Los Alamos

Next generation "capability" machine from Cray Inc. will support the weapons programs at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore

Apr. 5, 2010—The National Nuclear Security Administration officially has announced the acquisition of its newest supercomputing platform from Cray Inc. The contract was awarded late last week.

The new platform, named "Cielo," the Spanish word for sky, will support all three NNSA national laboratories — Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore. The selection was made through a competitive procurement process that included a technical evaluation by the three labs.

Design, procurement and deployment were accomplished by the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale (ACES), a joint partnership between Los Alamos and Sandia.

"Both Los Alamos and Sandia have a long history with Cray, going back to the very beginning of the supercomputing era", said John Morrison, High Performance Computing Division Leader at Los Alamos. "With the Cielo platform, that history continues with the next generation of capability computing in support of the U.S. nuclear security enterprise."

“Cielo will be an invaluable addition to the suite of supercomputing platforms that helps NNSA ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile without testing,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “This has been a great partnership between the labs and has brought together unique capabilities and expertise from each institution.”

With a projected cost of less than $54 million, Cielo is the next generation capability class platform for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. Cielo will be installed in third quarter of 2010, with additional capability planned for 2011.

Cielo will provide more than ten times the capability of the Purple platform at Livermore and will be a National User Facility. This additional increased capability will be used to increase understanding of complex physics and improve confidence in the predictive capability for stockpile stewardship.

The platform will be housed at the Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation. Cielo’s architecture is based on Cray’s next generation “Baker” architecture with AMD’s new Magny-Cours processor, Cray’s “Gemini” high-speed interconnect and Compute Node Linux operating system.

In phase one, the platform will consist of 72 cabinets, 6,704 compute nodes, 107,264 compute cores, and 221.5 terabytes of memory. The hardware will take up about 1,500 square feet and use less than 4 megawatts of energy. In phase two, the system will be expanded to 96 cabinets with nearly 9,000 compute nodes and approximately 300 terabytes of memory.