Photos: Supercomputers ready for work


Photos: Setting up Blue Gene/L
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.
Photos: Setting up Blue Gene/L
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.
Photos: Setting up Blue Gene/L
The installed supercomputer has 65,536 processors and has sustained performance of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.
Photos: Another shade of supercomputer
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.
Photos: Another shade of supercomputer
Each ASC Purple cabinet has numerous networking cables that connect separate servers into a single mammoth machine.