Cielo Replaces Purple as ASC Capability Computing Platform

Cielo, Spanish word for sky, is NNSA’s next-generation capability computing platform, required by the ASC Program to support the national Stockpile Stewardship Program. Cielo is a Cray Computing system and a project of ACES, the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale, a joint project of Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

The Cielo system will be allocated for ASC Capability Computing Campaign (CCC) projects that support stockpile stewardship work. It is designed to run simultaneous jobs that use a large percentage of the system resources, although smaller jobs will be accommodated.

With 10 times more peak computing power, Cielo replaces the recently retired ASC Purple system. The new platform is installed at Los Alamos and will support ASC programs at all three NNSA national laboratories beginning Feb. 2011. Cielo will initially provide more than 1 peak petaFLOPS. Consisting of 72 cabinets with a footprint of only 1500 sq. ft., Cielo will use less than 4 megawatts of power for operation.

The Cielo principals are NNSA Federal Project Directors Atinuke Arowojolu and Sander Lee, HQ; ACES Co-Directors Sudip Dosanjh, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and John Morrison, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); Project Director Manuel Vigil, LANL; and Chief Architect Doug Doerfler, SNL.