Livermore lab opens door to supercomputers

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has opened a new center as part of expanding efforts to share with industry and academia its capabilities in high performance computing. The lab will make some of its computer systems available for work in areas such as product design and manufacturing, data management and the operation of complex energy and communication systems.

The new center is a first step for the lab toward a goal of creating an open campus on the east side of its complex. The center aims to serve a broad range of industries that could use its big clusters including aerospace, automotive and transportation, energy, health care, finance, materials manufacturing, nanotechnology and even consumer electronics.

The so-called High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC) "opens a new era in Lawrence Livermore’s collaboration with universities and industry,” said George Miller, director of Lawrence Livermore.

The lab hopes the new center creates a win-win, promoting technology innovation, especially in the energy industry, while broadening the lab's own base of expertise.

The new center is open for multi-partner collaborations that could include other government agencies, research institutions and academia. Lawrence Livermore will supply expertise running the data center and providing data analysis and visualization support which it has experience applying to fields ranging from materials science and nanotechnology to bioscience and nuclear fusion energy.

Lawrence Livermore has engaged industry in the past. The Hyperion project let companies test out how their software scaled on the labs giant clusters. In addition, the labs expertise in fluid dynamics was recently applied to aerodynamic drag on tractor trailers.

Lawrence Livermore helped end testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. by providing on supercomputers advanced simulation capabilities of nuclear explosions and the effects of aging on existing nuclear weapons. The lab developed with IBM and others a series of supercomputers including BlueGene/L, which held the number one ranking for four years on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful computers.

Specifically, the new center will provide access to the 229 TeraFlop IBM system, a 44 Teraflop Appro cluster and a 261 TeraFlop Dell system called Sierra. The center will also make available petabytes of storage and selected I/O systems.

Fred Streitz, a computational physicist at the lab, will serve as the HPCIC director. He also is director of the lab's Institute for Scientific Computing Research.