A Kansas City, Mo., company will help upgrade infrastructure at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to accommodate future exascale computing capability, under a contract from lab prime Livermore National Security.
Burns & McDonnell announced the award Monday. The company did not provide the financial terms of the contract, which involves design services for Livermore’s Exascale Computing Facility Modernization project at building LCC B453. Congress approved $23 million for the project in fiscal 2019, which began Oct. 1.
The upgrades to the building’s electronics and cooling capacity are slated to be ready to support an exascale capability by 2022, according to a press release Monday. A second exascale facility is slated to come online at Livermore in 2028.
“At a quintillion (a billion billion) calculations each second, exascale computing has potential to drive discoveries across the spectrum of scientific fields and have a profound impact on everyday life,” Anna Maria Bailey, high performance computing chief engineer at Livermore, said in the Burns & McDonnell release. “The exascale supercomputers will surpass the fastest computers in today’s world, analyze massive volumes of data and simulate complex processes and relationships.”
Exascale computing will help support Livermore’s mission to ensure the destructive power of aging nuclear weapons by creating computer models that act in part as a stand-in for discontinued nuclear-explosive testing.
Supercomputer primacy has become a favorite stumping point for Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who in April put his name on a press release announcing a request for proposals to build at least two exascale systems, under contracts totaling $1.8 billion, at Livermore and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
