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Photos: Supercomputers ready for work

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Blue Gene/L and the ASC Purple prepare to show their colors.
By Bill Detwiler, Contributor
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1 of 5 Bill Detwiler/ZDNET

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.

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2 of 5 Bill Detwiler/ZDNET

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.

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3 of 5 Bill Detwiler/ZDNET

Photos: Setting up Blue Gene/L

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

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4 of 5 Bill Detwiler/ZDNET

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.

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5 of 5 Bill Detwiler/ZDNET

Photos: Another shade of supercomputer

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

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