Enabling Department-Scale Supercomputing

Abstract

The Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories have one of the longest and most consistent histories of supercomputer use. We summarize the architecture of DOE'S new supercomputers that are being built for the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). We then argue that in the near future scaled-down versions of these supercomputers with petaflop-per-weekend capabilities could become widely available to hundreds of research and engineering departments. The availability of such computational resources will allow simulation of physical phenomena to become a full-fledged third branch of scientific exploration, along with theory and experimentation. We describe the ASCI and other supercomputer applications at Sandia National Laboratories, and discuss which lessons learned from Sandia's long history of supercomputing can be applied in this new setting.