Livermore Taps Clustering

MILPITAS, Calif. -- Appro (http://www.appro.com/), a leading provider of high-performance enterprise computing servers, storage and high-end workstations, today announced the award of an additional supercomputing cluster from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This additional cluster deployment, named "Minos" will consist of a supercomputing Linux Cluster made of Appro 1U Quad XtremeServer with a total of 6 scalable units (SU) each with 144 nodes for a total of 864 nodes/6,912 cores based on Second-Generation AMD Opteron(TM) processors. Its peak performance is 33.18 TFLOPS with a total of 13,864GB of memory available.This High-Performance Computing (HPC) Solution includes a two stage 20 Gb/s 4x Double Data Rate (DDR) InfiniBand fabric featuring Voltaire edge, spine switches and Mellanox dual port DDR InfiniBand HCAs. These clusters are estimated to be deployed by the end of July 2007.

The Minos cluster will join the already installed 4 SU, 576 node "Rhea"cluster and will be used for Stockpile Stewardship capacity computingworkload: jobs with 256-4,192 way MPI Parallelism. Stockpile stewardship is the U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration(NNSA) program to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear deterrent without underground testing. Minos will be one of the machines used by NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program for stockpile stewardship calculations. This will run the integrated weapons design codes in support of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) design effort as well as laser plasma interaction studies for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a stadium-sized 192-beam facility containing the world's largest laser.

"The Minos Linux cluster will provide needed capacity computing cycles for Livermore's Stockpile Stewardship scientific simulation," said Mark Seager ICCD ADH for Advanced Technology. "The Minos cluster will also contribute to multiple efforts within the Laboratory." Appro International Inc.