Trinity Facilities and Operations Planning and Preparation: Early Experiences, Successes, and Lessons Learned

There is considerable interest in achieving a 1000 fold increase in supercomputing power in the next decade, but the challenges are formidable. The need to significantly decrease power usage and drastically increase energy efficiency has become pervasive in the high performance computing community, extending from chip design to data center design and operations. In this paper the authors present a short summary of early experience, successes, and lessons learned with respect to facilities, operations, and monitoring of the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale (ACES), a collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Trinity Supercomputer during the facility preparation and pre-acceptance testing phases of the project. The Trinity Supercomputer, which is designed to exceed 40 Petaflops/s, is physically located at Los Alamos’ Strategic Computing Center (SCC) and is a next step toward the goal of exascale computing (a million, trillion operations per second). Discussion topics include facilities infrastructure upgrades, Sanitary Effluent Reclamation Facility (SERF) water use, adaptive design and installation approaches, scalability and stability of monitoring systems, and early power-capping investigation results.