ASCI Purple is a supercomputer that will be installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. The computer is a colloboration between IBM Corporation and Lawerence Livermore Lab. It is slated to be installed at the end of 2004. The contract for this computer along with the Blue Gene/L supercomputer was worth US $290 millions.

It is a redundant ring of IBM POWER5 SMP servers, 196 of these servers machines are connected together. The system contains 12,544 POWER5 microprocessors in total with 50 terabytes of total memory and 2 petabytes of total disk storage. The system will run IBM's AIX 5L operating system. The computer consumes 7.5 MW of electricity. It has a theoretical processing speed of 100 teraflops.

It was built as stage five of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live WMD testing following the moratorium on testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993.

External link

• IBM ASCI Purple press release (http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/news/pressreleases/2002/nov/asci_purple.html)
• Facts on ASCI Purple (http://www.sandia.gov/supercomp/sc2002/flyers/SC02ASCIPurplev4.pdf)