ASCI Blue Pacific

ASCI Blue Pacific was a supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA at the end of 1998. It was a collaboration between IBM Corporation and Lawerence Livermore Lab.

It was an IBM RS6000 SP massively parallel processing system. It contained 5,856 PowerPC 604e microprocessors. Its theoretical top performance was 3.9 teraflops.

It was built as a stage of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live nuclear weapon testing following the moratorium on testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993.

External links

• "The ASCI machines". EPCC. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Archived from the original on 2003-07-26. IBM have installed two SP architecture MPP systems at Lawrence Livermore National Lab -- the Combined Technology Refresh (CTR) system of 1,344 332MHz PowerPC 604e processors and the larger Sustained Stewardship TeraOp machine of 5,856 processors. The CTR system is the machine that appears on the Top 500 list with a peak quoted speed of 0.9 Tflop/s and a sustained Linpack benchmark of 0.46 Tflop/s. In principle, the SST machine has a peak speed of 3.8 Tflop/s, but is as yet unmeasured in benchmark terms. 
• "Blue2000 - DOE's ASCI Program". National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NCO/NITRD). Arlington, VA. Archived from the original on 2004-10-18.