CM-5 Installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory

In February 1992, the Advanced Computing Laboratory (ACL) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) acquired the first production model of the recently announced Thinking Machines CM-5 parallel computer. This follow -up to the company's CM-2 model will aid researchers in solving computationally-intensive problems in areas such as combustion processes, global climate modeling, and molecular dynamics. Andy White, director of the ACL, commented, "with the CM-5, we look forward to being able to solve many of the Grand Challenge problems that have been intractable until now."

The CM-5 purchased by LANL is a massively parallel computer with 1,024 processors. In its largest configuration (16,000 nodes), this computer can scale to a peak performance of a teraflop. Space and financial factors, not technology, are now the limiting factors in achieving performance of this magnitude. Each node of the CM-5 is a 22-Mips RISC Sun SPARC microprocessor that has four vector pipes and is capable of 128 Mflops peak speed. The machine will operate in a timesharing environment and, unlike the CM-2, can perform in MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) mode. This will allow processors to execute different operations on a problem and make the machine much more amenable to solving a larger variety of applications.

Los Alamos currently has the two largest CM-2 computers in existence. Because of the success of these computers over the past year and a half, the new model has been eagerly awaited by scientists at the CRPC and elsewhere.

For information on future access to the CM-5, contact:
Paul Messina
CRPC Facilities Committee Chair
California Institute of Technology
MS 158-79
Pasadena, CA 91125
818-356-3907
messina@zephyr.caltech.edu

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