The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program ( 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 in order to support the Stockpile Stewardship Program (or SSP) . The goal of the initiative is to extend the lifetime of the current aging stockpile.
23-599: ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS ) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative ( ASCI ), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing . ASCI Red was built by Intel and installed at Sandia National Laboratories in late 1996. The design
46-496: A 32 KB level-1 cache and a 512 KB level-2 cache . According to Intel , the ASCI Red Computer is also the first large scale supercomputer to be built entirely of common commercially available components. All of ASCI Red's partitions are interconnected to form one supercomputer, however at the same time none of the nodes support global shared memory . Each of the nodes works in its own memory, and each shares data with
69-422: A mathematical function In economics, a factor of production , a resource employed to produce goods and services Advice (opinion) Impute (disambiguation) Output (disambiguation) Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Input . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to
92-422: A scalable parallel file system and network services. The System Partition supported initial booting and system Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) capabilities. The Service partition helps integrate all of the different parts of ASCI Red together. It provides a scalable host for users, and it is used for general system administration. The I/O Partition provides a file system and network services, and
115-415: Is its high I/O bandwidth . Previous supercomputers had multi- GFLOPS performance, yet their slow I/O speeds would slow down, or bottleneck the systems. Intel's TFLOPS PFS is an extremely efficient "Parallel File System" that can sustain transfer speeds of up to 1 GB/s, eliminating bottlenecks. In December, 1996, three quarters of ASCI Red was measured at a world record 1.06 TFLOPS on MP LINPACK and held
138-548: Is responsible for maintaining and creating the supercomputer software according to NNSA's standards. They also deal with the data, networking and software tools. The ASCI Path Forward project substantially funded the initial development of the Lustre parallel file system from 2001 to 2004. The Verification and Validation subdivision is responsible for mathematically verifying the simulations and outcomes. They also help software engineers write more precise codes in order to decrease
161-609: Is responsible for the mathematical codes that are produced by the supercomputers. They use these mathematical codes, and present them in a way that is understandable to humans. These codes are then used by the National Nuclear Society Administration, the Stockpile Steward Program, Life Extension Program, and Significant Finding Investigation, in order to decide the next steps that need to be taken in order to secure and lengthen
184-484: The TOP500 list for computing power. This list changes every six months, so please visit https://top500.org/lists/top500/ for the latest list of NNSA machines. Although these computers may be in separate laboratories, remote computing has been established between the three main laboratories. The ASC program publishes a quarterly newsletter describing many of its research accomplishments and hardware milestones. Within
207-639: The ASC program has created several different supercomputers with increasing power, in order to compute the simulations and mathematics. In celebration of 25 years of ASC accomplishments, the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program has published this report . The majority of ASC's research is done on supercomputers in three different laboratories. The calculations are verified by human calculations. The ASC program has three laboratories: The ASC program currently houses numerous supercomputers on
230-469: The ASC program, there are six subdivisions, each having their own role in the extension of the life of the stockpile. The Facility Operations and User Support subdivision is responsible for the physical computers and facilities and the computing network within ASC. They are responsible for making sure the tri-lab network, computing storage space, power usage, and the customer computing resources are all in line. The Computational and User Support subdivision
253-491: The Compute Partition which contained nodes optimized for floating point performance. The compute nodes had only the features required for efficient computation – they were not purposed for general interactive services. The Service Partition provided an integrated, scalable host that supported interactive users (log-in sessions), application development, and system administration. The I/O Partition supported disk I/O,
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#1732771796692276-682: The Paragon supercomputer. It consists of a light weight kernel, the Process Control Thread, and other utilities and libraries. The Linux 2.4 kernel was ported to the system and a custom CNIC driver was written, but the heavy weight OS did not perform as well as the Cougar lightweight kernel on many benchmarks. Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative After the United States' 1992 moratorium on live nuclear testing,
299-561: The Service partition is made up of the log-in screens, tools for application development, and utilities for network connections. The Compute partition contains nodes that are designed for floating point performance. This is where the actual computing takes place. Every one of the compute nodes accommodated two 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors , each with a 16 KB level-1 cache and a 256 KB level-2 cache , which were upgraded later to two 333 MHz Pentium II OverDrive processors , each with
322-588: The Stockpile Stewardship Program was created in order to find a way to test, and maintain the nuclear stockpile. In response, the National Nuclear Security Administration began to simulate the nuclear warheads using supercomputers. As the stockpile ages, the simulations have become more complex, and the maintenance of the stockpile requires more computing power. Over the years, due to Moore's Law ,
345-505: The computer work in an environment called "Teraflops OS", an operating system (once called Paragon OS) that was originally developed for the Intel Paragon XP/S Supercomputer. ASCI Red's Compute partition runs on an operating system named Cougar. Cougar is a Sandia Labs and University of New Mexico collaboration; it is a lightweight OS based on PUMA and SUNMOS , two systems that were also designed for use on
368-547: The first supercomputer to score above one teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark, a test that measures a computer's calculation speed. Later upgrades to ASCI Red allowed it to perform above two teraflops. ASCI Red earned a reputation for reliability that some veterans say has never been beaten. Sandia director Bill Camp said that ASCI Red had the best reliability of any supercomputer ever built, and “was supercomputing’s high-water mark in longevity, price, and performance.” ASCI Red
391-902: The 💕 [REDACTED] Look up input in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Input may refer to: Computing [ edit ] Input (computer science) , the act of entering data into a computer or data processing system Information , any data entered into a computer or data processing system Input device Input method Input port (disambiguation) Input/output (I/O), in computing Other [ edit ] Input (talk show) Input (typeface) International Public Television Screening Conference (INPUT), an international public television organization Input (online magazine) , an online technology and culture magazine owned by Bustle Digital Group See also [ edit ] All pages with titles containing Input Independent variable in
414-405: The life of the nuclear stockpile. The Advanced Technology Development and Mitigation subdivision is responsible for researching developments in high performance computing. Once information is found on the next generation of high performance computing, they decide what software and hardware needs to be adapted in order to prepare for the next generation of computers. Input From Misplaced Pages,
437-605: The margin of error when the computations are run. The Physics and Engineering Models subdivision is responsible for deciphering the mathematical and physical analysis of nuclear weapons. They integrate physics models into the codes in order to gain a more accurate simulation. They deal with the way that the nuclear weapon will act under certain conditions based on physics. They also study nuclear properties, vibrations, high explosives, advanced hydrodynamics , material strength and damage, thermal and fluid response, and radiation and electrical responses. The Integrated Codes subdivision
460-654: The others through "explicit message-passing". The computer itself took up almost 1,600 square feet (150 m) of space, and was made up of 104 "cabinets". Of those cabinets, 76 are computers (processors), 8 are switches, and 20 are disks. It had a total of 1212 GB of RAM, and 9298 separate processors. The original machine used Intel Pentium Pro processors each clocked at 200 MHz. These were later upgraded to specially packaged Pentium II Xeon processors, each clocked at 333 MHz. Overall, it required 850 kW of power (not including air conditioning). What sets ASCI Option Red aside from all of its predecessors in supercomputing
483-557: The record for fastest supercomputer in the world for several consecutive years, maxing out at 2.38 TFLOPS after a processor and memory upgrade in 1999. The system used Pentium Pro processors when initially constructed and when it recorded performance above one TFLOPS. In that configuration, when fully built it recorded 1.6 TFLOPS of performance. Upgrades later in 1999, to specially packaged Pentium II Xeon processors, pushed performance to 3.1 TFLOPS. The different partitions of ASCI Red run on different operating systems . For example, users of
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#1732771796692506-595: Was based on the Intel Paragon computer. The original goals to deliver a true teraflop machine by the end of 1996 that would be capable of running an ASCI application using all memory and nodes by September 1997 were met. It was used by the US government from the years of 1997 to 2005 and was the world's fastest supercomputer until late 2000. It was the first ASCI machine that the Department of Energy acquired, and also
529-488: Was decommissioned in 2006. The ASCI Red supercomputer was a distributed memory MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) message-passing computer. The design provided high degrees of scalability for I/O, memory, compute nodes, storage capacity, and communications; standard parallel interfaces also made it possible to port parallel applications to the machine. The machine was structured into four partitions: Compute, Service, I/O, and System. Parallel applications executed in
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