5. ASC Purple and BlueGene/L (US) – $290 million
ASC Purple and BlueGene/L came as a pack. The two were announced by the DoE in 2002 to be contracted out to IBM for $290 million.
Installed in 2005 in the Lawrence Livermore Lab, the machineries were decommissioned five years later.
At the time, the ASC Purple was ranked 66th on the TOP500 supercomputers list. This was an older generation and inferior model to the BlueGene/Q, a system which currently has four different supercomputers on TOP500’s top 10 list.
The ASCI Purple at the Lawrence Livermore Lab was built as stage five of the US Department of Energy and the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program, built to simulate and replace live WMD testing.
The BlueGene/L focused on important scientific areas, such as predicting global climate change, and studying the interaction between atmospheric density and pollution.
