ASC Purple

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ASC Purple is a supercomputer that is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. The computer is a collaboration between IBM Corporation and Lawrence Livermore Lab. It was installed in July 2005. The contract for this computer along with the Blue Gene/L supercomputer was worth US $290 million. As of November 2006, the computer ranks fourth on the TOP500 supercomputer list.

It is a redundant ring of IBM POWER5 SMP servers. 196 of these servers machines are connected together. The system contains 12,544 POWER5 microprocessors in total with 50 terabytes of total memory and 2 petabytes of total disk storage. The system runs IBM's AIX 5L operating system. The computer consumes 7.5 MW of electricity. It has a theoretical processing speed of 100 teraflops.

It was built as stage five of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC) started by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live WMD testing following the moratorium on testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993.