FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 3, 1998NEWS MEDIA CONTACTS:
Matthew Donoghue, 202/586-5806
Mary Dixon, 202/586-2249'PathForward' Aims for 30 Trillion Operations Per Second By 2001
President Clinton Announces DOE Partnership with Computer Companies
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico - President Bill Clinton today announced PathForward, the next step in the Department of Energy's effort to develop the supercomputers of the 21st century. The computers and simulation capabilities will be used to keep the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile safe, secure, and reliable without nuclear testing. The four-year, $50 million contracts are with Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Mass., International Business Machines (IBM) of Poughkeepsie, New York, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUN) of Chelmsford, Mass., and Silicon Graphics/Cray Computer Systems (SGI/Cray) of Chippewa Falls, Wisc. These collaborations with the computer industry will help reach the department's long-term goal of developing a 100 Teraflops computer by 2004.
ASCI was created to develop unprecedented computer simulation and modeling capabilities. The simulation tools will be validated using data from past nuclear tests and new nonnuclear experiments to assure the safety and reliability of the stockpile. Achieving these capabilities is essential to support the United States commitment to refrain from further nuclear testing.
"We signed contracts with four leading U.S. companies to help build supercomputers that will be a thousand times faster than the fastest computer that existed when I took office. By 2001, they will be able to perform more calculations in a single second than a human being with a hand-held calculator could in 30 million years," said President Bill Clinton. "Of all the remarkable things these supercomputers will be able to accomplish, none is more important than helping to make the world safe from the threat of nuclear weapons."
Secretary of Energy Federico Peña said, "The Department of Energy and its national laboratories are proud to rise to President Clinton's challenge: to develop technologies necessary to certify confidence in the safety and reliability of the enduring nuclear weapons stockpile. PathForward will help us meet this challenge."
PathForward is part of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) to develop the simulation capability needed for stockpile stewardship. The PathForward project will develop technologies to interconnect tens of thousands of advanced commodity processors, providing the collective computing power of at least 30 Teraflops (30 trillion floating point operations per second).
Improvements in critical scaling and interconnectivity technologies as well as operating systems are vital to achieving maximum performance in the time frame needed to keep the nuclear stockpile safe and secure.
The Department of Energy's national laboratories will need computers thousands of times more powerful than those normally available in the marketplace today. To meet the simulation requirements, the department is partnering with the U.S. high-end computing industry to acquire a series of computers capable of 10, 30 and ultimately 100 Teraflops by 2004.
With the PathForward project using "commodity" (off-the-shelf) parallel processing components, the department is capitalizing on a natural synergy with private sector partners: these four companies' business plans already coincide with the department's own goals and objectives for supercomputing. These developments would not occur on this accelerated time line without the department's active participation. PathForward is a cooperative research and development plan jointly administered by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. More information on the department's ASCI program can be found on the World Wide Web (the URL address is http://www.llnl.gov/asci).
- DOE -
R-98-009
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