Los Alamos National Lab. So, Los Alamos has been in the supercomputing business

for a long, long time: from the 40s before it was really called supercomputing.

We actually took the first problem to the first computer in the United

States: the ENIAC. Subsequently, we built our own variant of ENIAC

called MANIAC here at the Laboratory. We've been involved in a lot of firsts.

Probably one of the most important firsts is the invention of the Monte

Carlo Simulation Method and that was invented by Nicholas Metropolis

at Los Alamos. Almost every simulation done today uses Monte Carlo in some

way and so it's a really big deal. A recent first was the first machine to

achieve petascale, petaflop computing and that was Roadrunner. Roadrunner

was quite an interesting turning point for the community I think and it's led

us toward “If we can compute at that scale, can we compute an order of

magnitude, or two or three, more to explore things we didn't think we

could explore?” and that led to Trinity and Trinity was really designed to

solve this really large problem that needed to be resolved out to the point

where you needed the multi-petabytes of memory running on one job for many

months at a time to solve one problem. We have a request for proposal now

that's out to buy a machine to be delivered in 2020 and that machine

will be probably three to six, maybe eight, times larger than Trinity is some way.

And the reason we're buying a machine in 2016 to be delivered in 2020 is because

we're buying something that no one's invented yet, and it's going to take us

three or four years working with the chosen vendor. And so the whole cycle

is really quite long, right? It's four years to buy something and work with the vendor

to develop the technology, then you finally get it here and it takes a year to make it work

because it's never worked before, and then you get four years of productive

computing out of it and then it goes away and you do it again. At any one

time we have to have multiples of these going at once because it takes

nine years to do them.