LLNL teams with computing industry leaders to develop an advanced technology cluster testbed

AUSTIN, Texas. - The National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has teamed with 10 computing industry leaders to accelerate the development of powerful next-generation Linux clusters in a project dubbed Hyperion.

Hyperion brings together Dell, Intel, Supermicro, QLogic, Cisco, Mellanox, DDN, Sun, LSI, and RedHat to create a large-scale testbed for high-performance computing technologies critical to NNSA's work to maintain the aging U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without underground nuclear testing, and industry's ability to make petaFLOP/s (quadrillion floating operations per second) computing and storage more accessible for commerce, industry and research and development.

"Hyperion represents a new way of doing business. Collectively we are building a system none of us could have built individually," said Mark Seager, LLNL project leader. "The project will advance the state-of-the-art in a cost-effective manner, benefiting both end users, such as the national security labs, and the computing industry, which can expand the market with proven, easy to deploy large-and small-scale Linux clusters."

The goal of the project is to provide a development, testing and scaling environment for new cluster technologies and infrastructure critical to the mission requirements of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. This includes testing new hardware and software technologies and forming long-term relationships to ensure continuity in the development of new technologies for ever-larger systems over the long haul.