At Underwood & Rosenblum, Inc., we had to brace ourselves for the fast-paced Sequoia computer building designed for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2012. The liquid-cooled Sequoia computer brings back to the USA the title of the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is able to perform 16,320,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second (16.32 petaflops). This incredible performance would be the equivalent of all 6.7 billion people on earth using hand calculators to work together on a single calculation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 320 years…to do what Sequoia can do in one hour!
LLNL used a Scalable Building Arrangement (SBA) that will allow for the computer to expand in the future four-fold to a total projected area of 24,000 square feet. U&R was instrumental in piecing this project into the 1,067-acre LLNL campus master plan. This LEED Gold facility was value-engineered with energy-efficient building design, drought-resistant landscaping, “green” vehicle parking, and recreational trail connections.
Working as consultants to M+W Group, U&R, along with our landscape architect sub-consultant, ANLA, provided the design services for utility infrastructure, grading, drainage, paving, and landscape improvements for the facility. Needless to say, we had to work really fast.
