Supercomputers don't sell in as large volumes as mainstream business systems, but the market is important for other reasons. First, supercomputer research and development can be plowed back into mainstream computer products. In addition, government-funded initiatives help subsidise that development work. For example, the US Energy Department's Advanced Simulation and Computing programme, which grew out of the earlier Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, is underwriting ASCI Purple. Blue Gene/L is one step in IBM's ongoing project to build a machine by 2007 that can perform a quadrillion calculations per second -- a "petaflop". The task of the ultimate Blue Gene computer will be to predict the folding of proteins, the large biological molecules that are assembled from genetic information encoded in DNA. The 360-teraflop performance of Blue Gene/L is expected to be more than the collective 293-terflop ability of today's entire Top500 supercomputer list. For enormous systems with thousands of processors, a major challenge will be simply keeping all the components up and running and circumventing problem areas when they occur. IBM is working on autonomic computing technology, or machines that can diagnose and repair problems themselves, "so we can make systems of this size more self-maintaining," IBM's Ungaro said. "If there are failures, they can be routed around so the machine is still available to users." Nuclear know-how
In the mid-1990s, the Energy Department launched what was then the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, a plan to spur the development of supercomputers so they'd be fast enough to simulate nuclear weapons explosions in detail. The program, with a budget in the billions of dollars, was embraced by the nation's three national laboratories -- Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- as a way they could assure that nuclear weapons would work as designed, without having to rely on actual tests. The result has been a succession of ever-more-powerful supercomputers. The first contract was awarded in 1995 for work at the Sandia labs in Albuquerque, N.M., on Intel's ASCI Red system. The supercomputer was designed to perform 1 trillion calculations per second, or 1 teraflop. Next came the three-teraflop machines, Blue Mountain, built by SGI for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Blue Pacific, built by IBM at the Livermore lab in California. The third generation was ASCI White, the second IBM machine at Livermore labs. It was designed to run at 10 teraflops, but the machine topped out at 12.3 teraflops. The fourth generation, ASCI Q at Los Alamos, is designed ultimately to reach 30 teraflops. However, it's still under construction and so far exists as two 7.7-teraflop parts. New generation
ASCI Purple -- named after the colour resulting from a mixture of red, white, and blue -- was to be the pinnacle of the programme, with a target of 100 teraflops. It was to be the system that could handle the ultimate task: a "full physics" simulation in three dimensions of a nuclear blast, both of the "primary" fission explosion that begins the process and the resulting "secondary" fusion reaction that provides most of the energy in the nuclear detonation. But IBM believes there will be successors to ASCI Purple. "ASCI was originally laid out through 100 teraflops. But clearly they have a lot more science that needs to be done within the programme. I believe they have further aspirations," Ungaro said. Lab researchers are looking forward to more-sophisticated modelling abilities from future supercomputers. "We've done the primary and secondary of a simplified theoretical weapon," said Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory spokesman David Schwoegler. The simulation took about two months, he said -- but ASCI Purple will allow simulations in less time than that.
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