LANL takes delivery of new unclassified supercomputer

October 13, 2011—The Los Alamos National Laboratory's Institutional Computing Program is installing a new supercomputer nicknamed "Mustang." The 300+ Teraflop platform is an Appro Xtreme-X™ supercomputer that uses AMD Opteron processors.

Mustang will be used for a variety of unclassified research at Los Alamos, such as the study of oceans, wildfire, plasma physics, advanced materials, and nuclear energy. The Climate, Ocean, and Sea Ice Modeling (COSIM) project, a part of the climate modeling program in the DOE’s Office of Science, is a partner with Institutional Computing in this acquisition.

"Scientific computing is a core capability of Los Alamos National Laboratory," said Andy White, deputy associate director for the Laboratory's Theory, Simulation and Computation directorate. "By combining observations, data, and theory with complex modeling, extremely fast computers, and visualization capabilities, we can achieve a better understanding of the physical world on all scales; from the cosmically large to the infinitesimally small."

Mustang’s compute component consists of 1600 nodes, each with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors and 64 Gigabytes of memory. Mustang will provide LANL users with a total of 38,400 cores, 102.4 TB of memory, and 353 Teraflops per second (TF/s).

"The new Mustang machine will essentially double our unclassified computing capabilities at Los Alamos," said White. "It will join five other machines in our Turquoise Open Collaborative Network."

Turquoise Network

The Turquoise network currently houses five machines providing almost 300 TF/s of aggregate performance to users and provides a collaborative unclassified computing environment for LANL researchers as well as external collaborators. The new Mustang machine will more than double the Turquoise network performance and do so in a single 353 TF/s machine.

The next largest machine in the Turquoise network is Cerrillos, a 152 TF/s unclassified small-Roadrunner machine using Cell processors as accelerators. The Turquoise network was recently upgraded to nearly double bandwidth to disk storage, and 20x–100x increased bandwidth to external sites, and will be further upgraded with 480 terabytes (TB) of additional disk storage in November.