ASCI Blue Mountain is a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was designed to run simulations for the United States National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. The computer was a collaboration between Silicon Graphics Corporation and Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was installed in 1998. It is a

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...

ccNUMA Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to the processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non ...

SGI Origin 2000 systems. It contains 6,144 MIPS R10000 microprocessors in 48,128 processor systems connected by HIPPI in 438 racks. Its theoretical top performance is 3.072

teraflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

. It was built as a stage of the

Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (or ASC) is a super-computing program run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, in order to simulate, test, and maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. The program was created in 1995 ...

(ASCI) started by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live

nuclear weapons A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...

testing following the moratorium on testing started by President

George H. W. Bush George Herbert Walker BushSince around 2000, he has been usually called George H. W. Bush, Bush Senior, Bush 41 or Bush the Elder to distinguish him from his eldest son, George W. Bush, who served as the 43rd president from 2001 to 2009; pr ...

in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993. It was unveiled (commissioned) in 1998. In June 1999 it was the world's second fastest computer, and remained among the world's ten fastest computers until November 2001. According to the Los Alamos National Laboratory website, the supercomputer set a world record in May 2000, with the equivalent of 17.8 years of normal computer processing within 72 hours, including 15,000 engineering simulations requiring 10 hours each. First commissioned in November 1998, the Blue Mountain was decommissioned on Monday, November 8, 2004 at 8 am, and was replaced by the

ASCI Q The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (or ASC) is a super-computing program run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, in order to simulate, test, and maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. The program was created in 1995 ...

, Lightning, and QSC supercomputers.

References

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External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20120925185846/http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/photos/computing.html * http://library.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00418752.pdf MIPS architecture One-of-a-kind computers SGI supercomputers