The world’s fastest supercomputer, BlueGene/L, set a new performance standard on June 22, 2006. Housed at Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the machine achieved a sustained performance of 207.3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS).
An IBM supercomputer, BlueGene/L is ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer by the Top500 (www.top500.org). It is used to conduct materials science simulations that NNSA needs to keep the nuclear weapons stockpile safe, secure and reliable without underground nuclear testing.
"This is an important step on the path to performing predictive simulations of nuclear weapons, and these simulations are vital to ensuring the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons stockpile. These results further confirm that BlueGene/L's architecture can scale with real-world applications," said Dimitri Kusnezov, head of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.
The performance improvement over previous efforts was due in large measure to new mathematical libraries developed by software researchers at IBM that take best advantage of BG/L's dual-core architecture.
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NNSA Announces New Mark for World's Fastest Supercomputer (press release)