FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 16, 1996NEWS MEDIA CONTACTS:
Chris Kielich, Matthew Donoghue, 202/586-5806DOE's "Ultra" Computer Reaches 1 Trillion Operations Per Second Milestone
On-line, On Time and On Budget
Intel Corporation, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), today announced the world's first 1-trillion-calculations-per-second computer. It would take every man, woman and child in the United States working non-stop with hand calculators over 125 years to equal what this computer can do in one second.
This "ultra" computer, which has the capacity to do more than one trillion operations per second (teraflops), is part of the department's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) which is developing simulation technologies to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrence without underground testing. Today's announcement of DOE's "ultra" computer follows President Clinton's signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty September 24. The $55 million machine is to be installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and will also be used by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
In addition to simulating aging effects on the nuclear weapons stockpile, this "ultra" computer and others like it will provide the power for medical and pharmaceutical research, weather prediction, aircraft and automobile design, industrial process improvement and other quality-of-life research.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O'Leary said, "This achievement firmly re-establishes U.S. computer industry leadership in developing high end systems. Four years ago the U.S. government, industry and academia set a goal similar to breaking the four minute mile. At that time it was not clear how or even if a trillion-operations-per-second computer could be achieved. Now thanks to U.S. innovation, it's not only possible, it's being done."
The breakthrough announced today is the culmination of years of effort to reinvent computing. Instead of building a better, faster single computer processor (or brain), which would have been extremely difficult and expensive, the U.S. program invented an entirely new computer technology, called parallel computing. This approach allows the biggest computers in the world to be assembled from mass produced computer brains, called microprocessors, which were developed for use in desktop and home computers.
"Today's accomplishment is computing's equivalent to breaking the sound barrier," said Dr. Craig R. Barrett, Intel executive vice president and chief operating officer. "Just a few years ago, a teraflop was an intellectual barrier that nature dared us to cross. Now that we've surpassed that barrier we have the computing horsepower needed to address the Grand Challenges of Science. We could be at the threshold of robust scientific discovery, triggered by access to teraflop-level computing performance."
This computer architecture invention switched the trillion-operations-per-second speed objective from the impossible into the do-able. Although other countries are now widely copying U.S. designed parallel computers, the U.S. remains the world leader in building and developing big, fast "ultra" computers.
Civilian research expected to be performed using the new machine includes simulation of disease progression that could help doctors and scientists develop new medicines and drug therapy for debilitating diseases such as cancer and AIDS; severe weather tracking to minimize loss of human life and property; mapping the human genome to facilitate cures for genetic-based diseases or birth defects; car crash and highway safety; and environmental remediation methods to clean up and reclaim polluted land.
- DOE -
R-96-178
Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list
