Attaway Supercomputer Timelapse

In 2008, the President of the United States asked engineers to assess the feasibility of shooting down an orbiting US satellite from a moving Navy vessel in the open ocean. It was called Project “Burnt Frost,” a six-week priority mission to address a potential National Security threat. Among the engineers assigned to this project was Steve Attaway, a Sandia National Laboratories high-performance computing (HPC) expert. Without his expertise and the use of HPCs, the mission wouldn’t have been successful.

To honor the late Steve Attaway and all his contributions to the HPC community, the Attaway supercomputer is built to be a bleeding-edge machine that adds to Sandia’s HPC capacity system. Sandia researchers who require HPC resources will be able to use The Attaway for solving big problems like Project “Burnt Frost.”

In November 2019, the Attaway was #94 on the Top 500 Supercomputers list.

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