Yesterday's announcement of the new Mesa supercomputer to be built at Los Alamos is a bit of sad history-making for Sandia National Laboratories.

When National Nuclear Security Administration officials announced their proposals to slim down the U.S. nuclear weapons complex back in December 2007, they told us that Sandia would no longer host any of the nuclear weapons program's big supercomputing hardware. Where each of the three weapons labs had, in the past, taken turns building the latest and greatest supercomputers, that responsibility (privilege?) would now fall solely to Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

Twelve years ago, it was a Sandia-Intel machine that broke the teraflop barrier. Sandia pioneered the development of massively parellel computing - dividing problems up into tiny chunks and spreading them across a large number of processors. This is at the heart of essentially all modern supercomputers.

Now, the plan is for the machines built at Los Alamos to be built jointly by Sandia and Los Alamos computer people. It's a bit of an odd approach, but that is what yesterday's announcement portends - a Sandia-Los Alamos collaboration to set up a new supercomputer at Los Alamos.

(Picture of ASCI Red, the first teraflop machine, courtesy Sandia National Laboratories)

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