The ASCI Q supercomputing system at Los Alamos National Laboratory, based on AlphaServer systems from HP, is the second largest computing system in the world, according to the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list. The Q supercomputing system is the latest advancement in the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) within NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which uses an integrated program of surveillance, experiments, non-nuclear tests, archived data, modeling and simulation to assess and certify the safety, security and reliability of nuclear weapons without underground nuclear testing.
In addition to nuclear simulation, the ASCI Q system is used for ‘grand challenge’ scientific research such as simulating the creation of the earth. Recent earth simulations, the K-T impact runs, simulated the asteroid impact at Chicxulub Mexico that ended the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago. This simulation, pictured below, was done on the LANL QB machine with the DOE ASCI Crestone Project's RAGE code, an adaptive mesh refined Eulerian hydrocode with multiple material equations of state and strength properties. The simulation took 2 months and used up to 1024 HP Alpha processors of QB, for a total of 1 million cpu hours. It generated 13 Terabytes of simulation data. Other earth science simulations that are being done on Q include volcanic eruptions, global climate modeling, tsunami generation and propagation.
The Q system, when complete, will include 3 segments, each providing 10 TeraOPS capability. The three segments will be able to operate independently or as a single system. One-third of the final system has been available to users for classified ASCI codes since August 2002. This portion of the system, known as QA, comprises 1024 AlphaServer ES45 SMPs from Hewlett Packard (HP), each with 4 Alpha 21264 EV-68 processors. Each of these 4,096 CPUs has 1.25-GHz capability, creating an aggregate 10 TeraOPS.
Los Alamos has an option to purchase the third 10 TeraOPS system from HP. The final Q system will provide 30 TeraOPS capability:
- 3072 AlphaServer ES45s from Hewlett Packard (formerly Compaq)
- 12,288 EV-68 1.25-GHz CPUs with 16-MB cache
- 33 Terabytes (TB) memory
- Gigabit fiber-channel disk drives providing 664 TB of global storage
- Dual controller accessible 72 GB drives arranged in 1536 5+1 RAID5 storage arrays, interconnected through fiber-channel switches to 384 file server nodes.
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