We haven’t heard from the folks at Appro in several months.  They’ve been busy delivering a series of large machine procurements to Japan and the Advanced Simulation and Computing groups [ASC] of the National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA].  If you remember back to last year, Appro won a contract to deliver compute to the Tri-Labs [TLCC07], Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab.  This deployment is the final delivery for that contract.

The ability to provide a SU in multiple scalable clusters to all three national Lab sites with a 30-50% lower TCO was of great value to NNSA’s effort to apply high performance computing to time-urgent national security challenges,” said Mark Seager, ICCD ADH for Advanced Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Lab. “We needed a partner to bring strong technical skills to the table including an understanding of the HPC ecosystem as well as the project management skills necessary to work with a large number of component suppliers. Fielding 31 SUs (4,464 compute nodes with an aggregate performance of 620 TFLOP/s) at three Tri-Lab sites (LLNL, LANL, SNL) was a daunting
project challenge that, in this case, was very well executed.”

All together, Appro deployed 428TFlops of compute to the three labs in 21 scalable units [SU].  The principle use of the new machines will be in support of NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs, including the Stockpile Stewardship program.

For more info, read the full release here.