Appro Xtreme-X Ranks Among Top 15 Fastest Supercomputers in the World LLNL, LANL and Sandia initiate 2PetaFlop/s Xtreme-X Supercomputer deployment based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 Family

Appro has announced that the three U.S. national laboratories under contract with the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) initiated deployment of the next-generation, Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 Family. According to the latest Top500 list, one of the systems was ranked as the 15th fastest supercomputer in the world.

The Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer was selected in June 2011 as part of the second Tri-Lab Linux Capacity Cluster (TLCC2) program for an exclusive multi-year HPC contract to exceed 6 petaFlop/s for a total award including options of $89 million on behalf of the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). These supercomputers will be used by the three national laboratories in NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program: Lawrence Livermore (LLNL), Los Alamos (LANL) and Sandia (SNL).

The new Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer based on the Intel Xeon E5 Family have been deployed using the innovative Scalable Units building block design where each SU represents approximately 50 teraflops of computing power and will be configured and installed with the same architecture as Appro deployed in the previous awarded contracts; a concept that allows rapid manufacturing, delivery, aggregation and acceptance of scalable high performance Linux clusters. Appro plans to showcase its next generation system at SC11 in Seattle - November 14-17. System demonstrations and end-user best practice session will be presented at the Appro booth #2312.

The Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputers will provide needed computing capacity for NNSA’s day-to-day work managing the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent. In addition, these supercomputers will support NNSA Life Extension Program (LEP) and investigations into technical issues related to aging weapons systems, efforts critical to ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear weapons in the stockpile as they age well beyond their intended deployment life. HPC is a cornerstone of that effort and the computational expertise of the three labs is united under NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program.

“The ability to provide a scalable unit in multiple scalable clusters to all three national Laboratories with significant lower TCO, simplified integration and deployment on an accelerated timeline is of great value to NNSA’s effort to put high performance computing into production on an accelerated timeline to support national security challenges,” said Don Cook, NNSA’s Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs.

“The Tri-Labs supercomputer systems in this phase have a challenging mission that will require exceptional performance and performance efficiency,” said Rajeeb Hazra, General Manager of Intel Technical Computing Group. “We are delighted that TLCC2 has chosen to take advantage of the breakthrough performance of our Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 products to achieve their goals.”

TLCC2, Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputers scheduled to deploy from October to January 2012:
-    LLNL-ZIN, 18 SU (start operation November, 2011) : Rpeak 970.4 Tflops - Ranked #15 in the Top500
-    LLNL-HYPE, 1 SU (in operation since October, 2011) : Rpeak 53.9 TFlops
-    LLNL-MERL, 1 SU (start operation December, 2011) : Rpeak 53.9 TFlops
-    LANL-LUNA , 10 SU (start operation 1st half December/ 2nd half January 2012): Rpeak 539.1Tflops
-    LANL-CADDY, 1 SU (start operation December, 2011) : Rpeak 53.9 TFlops
-    SNL-CHAMA, 8 SU (start operation 1st half December/2nd half January 2012) : Rpeak 431.3 Tflops

“We are pleased that Appro Supercomputers continue to play a prominent role in the important Tri-Lab Linux Capacity Cluster program meeting the demands of petascale computing and beyond while providing the reliability required by the NNSA/ASC Program Office with price/performance leadership,” said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro.