ASCI Blue Mountain was a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of 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 instruc ...

installed at the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...

Los Alamos, New Mexico Los Alamos (, meaning ''The Poplars'') is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as one of the development and creation places of the Nuclear weapon, atomic bomb—the primary objective of ...

. It was designed to run simulations for the United States

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 science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, and ef ...

's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. The computer was a collaboration between

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

Corporation and Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was installed in 1998. It was a

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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 The SGI Origin 2000 is a family of mid-range and high-end server computers developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics (SGI). They were introduced in 1996 to succeed the SGI Challenge and POWER Challenge. At the time of introduction, these ...

systems. It contains 6,144 MIPS

R10000 The R10000, code-named "T5", is a RISC microprocessor implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI), then a division of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). The chief designers are Chris Ro ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

s in 48 systems, each with 128 CPUs, connected by

HIPPI HIPPI, short for High Performance Parallel Interface, is a computer bus for the attachment of high speed storage devices to supercomputers, in a Point-to-point link#Point-to-point, point-to-point link. It was popular in the late 1980s and into ...

in 438 racks. Its theoretical top performance is 3.072

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

. It was built as a stage of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by the U.S.

Department of Energy A ministry of energy or department of energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-rela ...

and the

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 nuclear fission, fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and nuclear fusion, fusion reactions (thermonuclear weap ...

testing following the moratorium on testing started by

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George H. W. Bush George Herbert Walker BushBefore the outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election, he was usually referred to simply as "George Bush" but became more commonly known as "George H. W. Bush", "Bush Senior," "Bush 41," and even "Bush th ...

in 1992 and extended by

Bill Clinton William Jefferson Clinton (né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician and lawyer who was the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, ...

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

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, Lightning, and QSC supercomputers.

References

External links

* * {{cite web, url=http://library.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00418752.pdf, title=The ASCI Blue Mountain 3-TOps System, On the Road to 100 TeraOps, publisher=Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) MIPS architecture One-of-a-kind computers SGI supercomputers