News

IBM's Bluegene/L Achieves New Mark as World's Fastest Supercomputer

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and IBM teamed up to announce that a new mark was achieved on the world's fastest supercomputer named BlueGene/L (BG/L). This world record for a scientific application was set by achieving a sustained performance of 207.3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS) on the computer code for conducting materials science simulations critical to national security.

BG/L is an IBM supercomputer housed at NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is used to conduct materials science simulations for NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program, which unites the scientific computing know-how of NNSA's Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. The computer simulation capabilities developed by the ASC program provide the nuclear weapons analysis that NNSA needs to keep the nuclear weapons stockpile safe, secure and reliable without underground nuclear testing.

The performance improvement over previous efforts was due in large measure to new mathematical libraries developed by software researchers at IBM that take best advantage of BG/L's dual-core architecture. Today's results represent the first time in history that a scientific code has sustained a level of performance in excess of 200 teraFLOPS, breaking the former record also set on Blue Gene at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,ќ said David Turek, vice president of Deep Computing at IBM.


print	save	email	comment