Stanford and other PSAAP centers will focus on unclassified applications of interest to the NNSA and its three national laboratories: Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia. The PSAAP centers will develop not only the science and engineering models and software for their large-scale simulations but also methods associated with the emerging disciplines of verification and validation, and uncertainty quantification. The goal of that research is to enable scientists to make precise statements about the degree of confidence they have in their simulation-based predictions.

To perform the simulations, the researchers will have access to some of the NNSA's fastest supercomputers. One such machine, named "BlueGene/L," has a theoretical peak performance of 478.2 teraFLOPS and ranks eighth in the world in supercomputer performance, according to the website Top500.org.

Other commodity processor and network machines are Hera/LLNL (13,824 core), Lobo/LANL (4,352 core) and Glory/Sandia (4,068 core). Cerrillos/LANL, a small version of Roadrunner with the hybrid processor architecture, is also available with 360 nodes, each containing 4xOperton + 4xCell.

ASC @ Livermore
https://asc.llnl.gov

ASC @ Los Alamos
http://www.lanl.gov/asc

ASC @ Sandia
http://www.sandia.gov/ASC/