Summer Myatt
Los Alamos National Laboratory is in the process of testing Crossroads, the successor to a high-performance computing machine used by the National Nuclear Security Administration to monitor U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise-built system will replace the aging Trinity supercomputer as part of NNSA’s continuous upgrades to support large data sets for stockpile simulation and computation, the laboratory said Thursday.
A partnership between LANL and Sandia National Laboratories awarded HPE a $105 million contract to deliver the next-generation supercomputer.
Crossroads is the third platform installed at NNSA laboratories, the two other research facilities being Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national labs. Installation began in June at Los Alamos’ Strategic Computing Complex.
So far, the supercomputer has been integrated into the lab’s high-performance computing network, and its crew is working with HPE to run initial diagnostics.
“With the introduction of a key codesign element, high-bandwidth memory, Crossroads will deliver four to eight times better performance than Trinity on our most challenging stockpile simulation codes,” said Irene Qualters, associate laboratory director for simulation and computation at LANL.
The three NNSA labs expect Crossroads to become available this fall.