The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (DOE/NNSA’s) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has awarded a subcontract to Dell Technologies for additional supercomputing systems to support NNSA’s nuclear deterrent mission, NNSA said in a statement.

In partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), the second Commodity Technology Systems contract (CTS-2) is funded by NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. It will provide $40 million for more than 40 petaFLOPs of expanded computing capacity delivered to the NNSA Tri-Labs (LLNL, LANL, and SNL).

The computing systems built under the CTS-2 contract will be deployed at the Tri-Labs in building blocks called “scalable units” (SUs), with each SU representing approximately 1.5 petaFLOPs of computing power, says NNSA.

Initial system deliveries are scheduled to begin in mid-2022 and will continue through 2025. They are expected to replace the current ASC commodity systems which were sourced by the 2015 CTS-1 contract and are now nearing retirement, according to the NNSA.

The CTS-2 SU hardware will couple with the LLNL-led Tri-Laboratory Operating System Software (TOSS) and provide the foundation for the common ASC user simulation environment, says NNSA. The CTS-2 SUs will incorporate Intel Xeon Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids) with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

[Image courtesy: NNSA]