Photos: Supercomputers ready for work

Workers install cables beneath the floor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory data center that houses Blue Gene/L. The supercomputer--the world's fastest, by one measure--was being prepared for its formal unveiling on Oct. 27, 2005.

The racks of the Blue Gene/L supercomputer are put in the data center, located in Livermore, Calif. The diagonal structures are plenums that help evenly distribute cool air to the machines.

The installed supercomputer has 65,536 processors and has sustained performance of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.

Another supercomputer, ASC Purple, also made its debut Oct. 27 at the Livermore lab. It uses fewer but more powerful individual processors than Blue Gene/L, and each server has much more memory.

Each ASC Purple cabinet has numerous networking cables that connect separate servers into a single mammoth machine.