ASC Purple

ASC Purple is a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore ( California). It was developed in cooperation with IBM developed with funds from the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program and put into service in October 2005.

Construction

The system consists of 196 interconnected IBM eServer pSeries p5 575 SMP mainframes with a total of 12,288 IBM Power5 processors at 1.9 GHz. The system has a total of 49.2 terabytes of main memory and 2.8 petabytes of disk space. The operating system is IBM AIX 5.3 is used.

The power consumption of ASC Purple including the cooling system is around 7.5 MW. That is about 100,000 times a office PCs (75 watts).

Performance

ASC Purple reached in November 2005 with a LINPACK performance of 63.39 TFLOPS ( theoretical peak performance: 77.82 TFLOPS ) # 3 on the supercomputer rankings TOP500. In November 2008, the computer with 75.76 TFLOPS at 92.78 TFLOPS of theoretical peak performance was listed at number 33.