CHAPTER 2 Inside the Computer
The Super Supercomputer It took 28 18-wheelers to ship the first batch of electronics for the world's largest supercomputer to its destination at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear research lab. Three more similarly sized shipments will be made soon. The huge supercomputer made by IBM will cover the area of about two basketball courts and consume enough electricity to power a small town. Called the ASCI White, it will be used to simulate nuclear test blasts, among other applications. The test blast simulations will last about 30 days each. A 1995 supercomputer would have taken 60,000 years to run such a simulation. The new supercomputer will operate at 12.3 trillion operations a second, or 12.3 teraflops. ASCI White is a massively parallel machine made from 512 of IBM's RS 6000 server computers. Each server has 16 processors, each a supercharged version of the PowerPC chip. The incredibly complex supercomputer takes about two hours to boot up. The $110 million supercomputer was built from off-the-shelf components. The primary application of this supercomputer is important because nuclear scientist will be able to predict the behavior of nuclear warheads as they age and change over time.