Vulcan was one of the largest, most capable computational resources available in the U.S. for industrial collaborators while it was commissioned from 2012–2019. This prodigious unclassified supercomputer was shared by the M&IC and ASC programs, with 1.5 of its 5 petaflops directly supporting NNSA’s mission to enhance U.S. economic competitiveness. Partners accessed Vulcan, whether for open, publishable science or business-sensitive and proprietary research, through the High Performance Computing Innovation Center.
HPCIC partners gained access to both a percentage of Vulcan for a period of time and to the entire associated infrastructure available in the world-class LC HPC environment, including subject-matter experts, network access, file systems, archive storage, and help-line support.
In addition to supporting HPCIC efforts, Vulcan was used for NNSA research programs, academic alliances, and LLNL institutional science and technology efforts. The 24-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q system was based on the POWER architecture. Vulcan was part of the contract that brought Sequoia to Livermore.
