ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in

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, which was briefly the fastest supercomputer in the world. ASCIWhite01

It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 nodes were interconnected for ASCI White, with each node containing sixteen 375MHz IBM POWER3-II

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

s. In total, the ASCI White had 8,192 processors, 6

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

s (TB) of memory, and 160TB of disk storage. It was almost exclusively used for large-scale computations requiring dozens, hundreds, or thousands of processors. The computer weighed 106tons and consumed 3MW of electricity with a further 3MW needed for cooling. It had a theoretical processing speed of 12.3 teraFLOPS (TFLOPS). A single modern 4U rackmount server could match these specifications while weighing under 50 kg and consuming under 2 kW of power. The system ran IBM's

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgi ...

operating system. ASCI White was made up of three individual systems, the 512-node White, the 28-node Ice and the 68-node Frost. The system was built in

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. Completed in June 2000 it was transported to specially built facilities in California and officially dedicated on August 15, 2001. Its peak performance of 12.3TFLOPS was not achieved in the widely accepted LINPACK tests. The system cost US$110 million (equivalent to $ million in ). It was built as stage three of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by the U.S.

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and the

National Nuclear Security Administration The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is a United States federal agency responsible for safeguarding national security through the military application of Nuclear physics, nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the Stockpil ...

to build a simulator to replace live WMD testing following the moratorium on testing started by

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George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by

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in 1993. The machine was decommissioned beginning July 27, 2006.

References

Cluster computing Nuclear stockpile stewardship Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory IBM supercomputers 64-bit computers {{Super-compu-stub