The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has unveiled two new IBM supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which are capable of the fastest processing speeds yet achieved.

The 65,536 processor BlueGene/L supercomputer has performed a record 280.6 trillion operations per second on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark - software used to rank the speeds of the world’s fastest machines.

Purple, the other half of the most powerful supercomputing twosome, is a machine capable of 100 trillion operations per second as it conducts simulations of a complete nuclear weapons performance.

Together, the Purple and BlueGene/L systems will perform half a petaflop, or half of a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second.

NNSA administrator Linton F Brooks said the machines will be used to run three-dimensional codes at lightning-fast speeds for nuclear weapons’ analysis. This was formerly accomplished by underground nuclear testing.

“The unprecedented computing power of these two supercomputers is more critical than ever to meet the time-urgent issues related to maintaining our nation’s aging nuclear stockpile without testing,” Brooks said.

“Purple represents the culmination of a 10-year effort to create a new class of supercomputers. BlueGene/L points the way to the future and the computing power we will need to improve our ability to predict the behaviour of the stockpile as it continues to age. This has reestablished American computing preeminence.”

In a recent demonstration of its work capability, BlueGene/L ran a record-setting materials science application at 101.5 teraflops sustained over seven hours on the machine’s 131,072 processors, running an application of importance to NNSA’s effort to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. A teraflop is one trillion computer operations per second.

Both machines were developed through NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program and join a series of other supercomputers at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories that are dedicated to NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship effort to maintain the nation’s nuclear deterrent through science-based computation, theory and experiment.