The IBM BG/L system housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) will be retired in July 2008. The system--with 1,024 dual-core nodes (2,048 processors) and 500 gigabytes of memory--has a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops. It has been instrumental in expanding the boundaries of scientific computing since February 2006.

The ALCF BG/L is being replaced by two IBM BG/P systems: Intrepid and Surveyor. Intrepid is the fastest open science supercomputer in the world--and the third fastest overall--according to the semi-annual Top500 List of the world's fastest computers. It is used for production scientific and engineering computing. Surveyor is used for tool and application porting, software testing and optimization, and systems software development.