Appro Xtreme-X Ranks among Top 15 Fastest Supercomputers in the World

By DE Editors

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 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 a 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, has been deployed using the Scalable Units building block design. In this design, 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. Appro is showcasing its next generation system at SC11 in Seattle this week. For more news on SC11, visit Engineering on the Edge.
 
The Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputers will provide 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. HPC will be used to assist the computational expertise of the three labs is united under NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program.

For more information, visit Appro.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.