U.S. Department of Energy Advances Nuclear Stockpile Research and Simulations with 4X More Powerful Supercomputer Built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced it is building a new supercomputer with quadrupled performance¹ for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The new system will support critical modeling and simulation of nuclear weapons at high 3D resolutions to ensure reliability and security of the nuclear stockpile.

The NNSA’s new system, which it has named “Crossroads,” will replace the existing Cray-based system, Trinity, to advance current and planned future research. The new system will be delivered in the spring of 2022 and hosted at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It will be used by the three NNSA national laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories during 2022 - 2026.

The Crossroads system, which is a $105M deal with HPE, will be powered by the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, a high-performance computing (HPC) architecture that is purpose-built for next-generation supercomputing and ideally suited for large-scale systems requiring the greatest performance, density, and efficiency. It will also feature future Intel Xeon processors code-named “Sapphire Rapids” for powerful next-generation compute and AI-accelerated capabilities that target and optimize emerging applications needed for advancing NNSA research, including 3D modeling at higher resolutions.

“HPE has a long history in designing a number of HPC systems for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and today’s announcement further builds on our commitment to deliver powerful and diverse architectures required for critical research missions in maintaining the reliability and security of the nation’s nuclear stockpile,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, at HPE. “In this collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, we are significantly advancing existing resources for NNSA research with the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which combines the Cray Shasta architecture and industry-leading HPC software and networking interconnect. We are also quadrupling performance with combined technologies featuring advanced compute, I/O, memory, networking and software to enable faster and more efficient performance for current and future projects.”