We don't know what happens when they age beyond their lifetimes. The ASCI effort aims at going far beyond the capability to run design codes, however. The ASCI program, as with its target technology, features parallel operation. The effort to produce breakthroughs in supercomputing capabilities encompasses similar efforts among the Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos laboratories. The program has three main elements.
Cooper describes the first, hardware, as the most important element in the effort.
This will sit between the user and the hardware to ensure effective and transparent interaction. For example, one goal is to help overcome problems with gang scheduling that can afflict massively parallel computers. Proper scheduling must ensure that all processors are kept busy, or else efficiency drops to only a few percent. This machine features 4,536 compute nodes and delivers a peak performance of 1.8 teraflops-trillion floating point operations per second. For the program's second stage, ASCI Blue, the Energy Department selected two U.S. supercomputing companies to join in partnership with its laboratories.