High Performance Computing Innovation Center opens at Lawrence Livermore; automotive and energy among industries to benefit
01 July 2011
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the opening of the High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC). Industries expected to benefit from the use of high performance computing (HPC) range from aerospace, automotive and transportation to utilities, energy, health care, finance, materials manufacturing, nanotechnology and consumer electronics.
HPCIC will facilitate national lab/industry collaboration, applying high performance computing to product design, development and manufacturing, data management and the operation of complex energy and communication systems.
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| A visualization of waves generated at the interface of two dissimilar moving fluids, modeled with atomic-level resolution at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Roughly 63 billion atoms were simulated on a supercomputer with more than 200,000 processors to analyze a physical phenomenon as familiar to us as the effects of wind blowing over a body of water. Click to enlarge. |
The HPC Innovation Center (HPCIC) makes available to industry more than two decades of experience as a global leader in supercomputing. To fulfill its primary mission to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent without testing, LLNL, in partnership with IBM, has developed and deployed some of the fastest supercomputers, including BlueGene/L, which held the No. 1 ranking on the industry-standard Top500 list of the world’s most powerful computers for nearly four years.
In 2010, IBM delivered a 500-teraFLOPs BlueGene/P system known as Dawn that will help lay the applications foundation for the 20-petaFLOP Sequoia system. Sequoia is scheduled for delivery in 2011, with full deployment in 2012.
LLNL offers expertise in every aspect of the management of an HPC center, including storage, analysis and visualization. As a multidisciplinary applied science laboratory, LLNL also has available scientists and engineers with extensive experience applying HPC to a broad set of technical problems in fields such as materials science, micro and nanotechnology, bioscience and energy, notably fusion energy.
The center is composed of three parts. A large classroom will provide space for both on-site and distance learning. An open collaboration area, mimicking creative spaces found in Silicon Valley, provides a place for facility users to meet, whether face to face or virtually. The third portion of the facility consists of fixed office space, available to partners who will be utilizing the facility on a regular basis and require more permanent workspace.
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This could be helpful for some applicatons, but my guess is that this is yet another way that the government, along with certain interested parties, spends huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, with little or no return, except for maybe the employment of the government personnel.
Posted by: citizen | 01 July 2011 at 10:26 AM
This could be helpful for some applicatons, but my guess is that this is yet another way that the government, along with certain interested parties, spends huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, with little or no return, except for maybe the employment of the government personnel.
Posted by: citizen | 01 July 2011 at 10:26 AM
Isn't this what the supercomputing centers at UC San Diego and Pittsburgh are supposed to be doing?
Posted by: danm | 02 July 2011 at 08:13 PM
Spending money is exciting.
Spending other peoples money is REALLY exciting.
Can anyone believe that after all the agency mission definition effort; after the metrics are argued, after the effort to obtain funding for your agency; after being sure you spend what you got last year(or you will get no more); after all the politics;
they only spend our money where there is most likely a return on investment (ROI)?
In private enterprise, every step is balanced against ROI. And if they still waste it, it is THEIR money, not mine.
Posted by: ToppaTom | 03 July 2011 at 01:44 PM