ACADEMIA

By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- On Friday May 17th, Los Alamos National Laboratory held a dedication and tour of the new Metropolis Laboratory that will house one of the world's fastest supercomputers. The 300,000-square-foot Nicholas C. Metropolis Center features a 43,500-square-foot computer room (about three-fourths the size of a football field) that will be home to the Q supercomputer, capable of performing 30 trillion computing operations each second. The Q technology is supplied by Hewlett-Packard. Part of the Q machine has already been installed and passed initial performance testing. "The Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation, which soon will house a 30 Trillion operations per second computer, will be critical to helping us carry out our mission responsibilities to maintain the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile," said John C. Browne, Director, Los Alamos National Lab. "This facility will house not only computers but multi-disciplinary teams of weapons designers and computer scientists and engineers who will advance the state of the art in scientific computing. This facility and their work will help us attract the brightest minds to Los Alamos who will solve the problems that will face our nation in the future." Q System Facts to help supply some perspective: * Q will operate at a peak speed of 30 trillion operations per second. By comparison, everyone on the planet would have to perform 5,000 calculations in a second to keep up with Q. * Q could assemble the human genome in four days, compared to Celera's 150 days. * Q will have 33 terabytes of memory, compared to the 40 megabytes of a typical personal computer. * Q can do in one day what a current, high-end personal computer can do in 60 years. The center is named in honor of Nicholas C. Metropolis (1915-1999) who is best known for developing mathematical methods for solving large-scale physical problems. He worked at Los Alamos for almost his entire career, beginning with the Manhattan Project. He helped develop MANIAC, the first computer built in Los Alamos. His Metropolis Algorithm, a mathematical approach to problem solving, sparked an entire field of computer science. "Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was a pioneer in computer science and played a pivotal role in securing a leadership position for Los Alamos in the field of scientific computing, Browne stated. "J. Robert Oppenheimer recruited Nick to work at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, where he worked to develop equations for the state of materials at high temperatures, pressures and densities. He sometimes joked that he spent much of that time repairing electromechanical calculators with Richard Feynman, who was at that time a physicist in the Lab's Theoretical Division and later won a Nobel Prize in physics." The Metropolis Center and its associated information infrastructure -- high-speed networks, workstations, visualization centers, interactive data-analysis tools and collaborative laboratories -- will support stockpile stewardship and, potentially, other research efforts involving the simulation of complex phenomena of national importance. Browne concluded, "Nick's work in mathematics and the seeds of computational science form the basis for much of what we, and our sister labs, do today. The human and computational capabilities of this Center will continue to push the state of the art in modeling and simulation. It is in honor of Nick Metropolis' legacy that we dedicate this facility to him, to his lifetime achievements and contributions to scientific computing." For more information visit www.lanl.gov