Sustainable Stockpile Stewardship

The new IBM 20-petaflops supercomputing system, Sequoia, will help continue to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear deterrent. Sequoia is currently being sited at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is scheduled for deployment in the fall of 2012. Sequoia's initial delivery system, Dawn, a 500 teraFLOPS BlueGene/P system, is currently being used to lay the applications foundation for multi-petaFLOPS computing on Sequoia.

Sequoia is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, equivalent to the 6.7 billion people on earth using hand calculators and working together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, for 320 years…to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.

Sequoia will be focused on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running very large suites of complex simulations called uncertainty quantification (UQ) studies. In addition, it will be used for weapons science calculations necessary to build more accurate physical models. This work is a cornerstone of NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship program to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile today and into the future without underground testing.

Sequoia will have 1.6 petabytes of memory, 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million cores. Though orders of magnitude more powerful than such predecessor systems as ASC Purple and BlueGene/L, Sequoia will be 160 times more power efficient than Purple and 17 times more than BlueGene/L.