Being able to ignite or reignite a gas turbine engine in a cold and rarefied atmosphere is a critical issue for many manufacturers. From a fundamental point of view, the ignition of the first burner and the flame propagation from one burner to another are phenomena that are usually not studied. The present work is a large eddy simulation (LES) of these phenomena. To simulate a complete ignition sequence in an annular chamber, LES has been applied to the full 360 degrees geometry, including 18 burners. This geometry corresponds to a real gas turbine chamber. Massively parallel computing (700 processors on a Cray XT3 machine) was essential to perform such a large calculation. Results show that liquid fuel injection has a strong influence on the ignition times. Moreover, the rate of flame progress from burner to burner is much higher than the turbulent flame speed due to a major effect of thermal expansion. This flame speed is also strongly modified by the main burner aerodynamics due to the swirled injection. Finally, the variability of the combustor sectors and quadrant ignition times is highlighted. (C) 2008 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.