ASC White

(Accelerated Strategic Computing White) A supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that was the fastest computer in the world when introduced in 2001. Used for weapons research, it was developed by IBM and made up of 512 16-way IBM RS/6000 computer systems. Its 8,192 processors provide 12.3 teraFLOPS of computing. Using 6TB of RAM and 160TB of disk space, ASC White (formerly ASCI White) is made from standard, off-the-shelf components.

Records Don't Hold for Long!
In 2005, the ASC Purple with 12,000 processors and a theoretical peak capacity of 93 teraFLOPS came online at Livermore. Even more amazing, so did a new machine called the Blue Gene/L, weighing in with 130,000 processors and an actual processing capacity of 270 teraFLOPS! Like the ASC White, the ASC Purple was slated to perform nuclear weapon simulations, while the Blue Gene/L was intended to study the behavior and movement of atomic molecules. See supercomputer sites.

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References in periodicals archive

Later tuning efforts had improved ASCI White's MTBF to 55 hours, Fiala said.

Supercomputers face growing resilience problems

ASCI Purple will cost $1.90 per gigaflops, and while this is a big improvement over the ASCI White parallel supercomputer IBM built for DOE a few years back (which is rated at 12.3 teraflops and which cost a little over $8 per gigaflops), Blue Gene/L only cost 28 cents per gigaflops.

IBM's Shows Off Its Future Blue Gene/L Supercomputer

It became operational in March 2002 as the world's fastest supercomputer, so quick that its raw processing power equaled that of the 20 speediest US computers combined, far outpacing the previous title holder, the IBM-built ASCI white at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is used for nuclear weapons simulations.

Heavy weather: from the cutting edge of computing, the Earth Simulator is taking scientists to new frontiers: the planet's most powerful computer seems straight out of Stanley Kubrick's eerie classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet the story the Earth Simulator is telling may be even more disturbing

--The second fastest computer is ASCI White built by IBM, with a score of 4,967.

IDC reports latest supercomputer rankings based on the IDC Balanced Rating test

(IBM and Lawrence Livermore co-developed the world's current record-breaking supercomputer, the "ASCI White" machine now in operation at the lab.) Compaq is racing IBM to see if it can better its record in the life sciences and is collaborating with genetic database company Celera Genomics and the DOE's Sandia National Labs.

The challenges of data management in biotech: booming life sciences research has IT resources bursting at the seams. (Storage Networking)

With the unveiling last week of the computer dubbed ASCI White, they have a machine that can perform the task much more quickly.

New initiatives scale up supercomputing

General John Gordon, the Department of Energy's under secretary for nuclear security, said the supercomputer - known as Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative White, or ASCI White - was the key to the country assuring nuclear deterrence, though it has a vast number of other uses.

World's wonder computer comes out from wraps

The supercomputer - known as Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative White, or ASCI White, has a mind-boggling amount of other uses, say researchers.

Hi-tech wonder unveiled by US boffins

The IBM machine at NERSC is the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, after IBM's classified ASCI White system.

IBM DELIVERS POWERFUL UNCLASSIFIED SUPERCOMPUTER

SETI@home contends its network of computers is rated at 15 teraflops and has cost just $500,000, while IBM's ASCI White supercomputer is rated at 12 teraflops and costs $110 million.

Supercomputing for Everybody and by Everybody

Some fill entire rooms, such as IBM's ASCI White, which is capable of running at speeds of 12.3 teraflops, or 12.3 trillion floating point operations a second.

Keener eyes for Beowulf