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"It is not clear from another plot where inertial confinement projects stand, except to say that they are still quite far from the ignition region."

Not exactly. In fact thermonuclear ignition will occur in the laboratory in ~3-4 years in an inertial confinement device. That's why they call it the National Ignition Facility. all scaled implosions and 3d simulations are pointing to fusion burn and HIGH GAIN from the NIF once its complete in a few years.

The numbers are real: US energy flow and US CO2 emissions, but energy efficiency is not the same as cost efficiency. Yes, centralized power generation is *significantly* less energy efficient than running a diesel engine locally, because transmission losses are quite high. But it's still significantly *cheaper* this way, as centralized power generation is vastly more price efficient than a bunch of local generators, more than enough to offset the transmission losses money-wise.

The numbers are real: US energy flow and US CO2 emissions, but energy efficiency is not the same as cost efficiency. Yes, centralized power generation is *significantly* less energy efficient than running a diesel engine locally, because transmission losses are quite high. But it's still significantly *cheaper* this way, as centralized power generation is vastly more price efficient than a bunch of local generators, more than enough to offset the transmission losses money-wise.

I should have said ethernet instead of "networking". Blue Gene/L's node interconnect looks pretty interesting though. http://www.llnl.gov/ASC/platforms/bluegenel/arch.h tml

o rly?

In a 200-hour test in September, the AVLIS separator operated around the clock for 6 days, processing 3 metric tons of uranium.

Incidentally, there are more than two methods for enriching uranium--the author of the article should have read Chapter 14 of Benedict, Pigford, & Levi.

I went over to the BlueGene/L's page to see how they manage to shuffle data around. They seem to use 1GB Ethernet links for IO nodes.

Any ideas why Ethernet is not an outsider here.

* lon3st4r *

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Hill.html

Spherical reactor.

You may then want to consider an algorithm like ROAM which allows dynamically varying mesh level of detail: in brief, triangles are recursively broken down tree-wise until either maximum triangles or sufficiently low visible error is reached; bump mapping or light mapping really helps because simple vertex lighting leads to disconcerting "pops" as new vertices with different normals are inserted. Pairing ROAM with this texture zooming technique could give some really spectacular results.

It it worth noting that the progress made in fusion research has been HUGE throughout the past 3-4 decades and while the next step is more difficult than the last we aew still making steady progress. JT-60 HAS attained a confinement quality in the deuterium-deuterium shots it has taken which are VERY good, so good that if they were done with deuterium-tritium mix they would firmly place JT-60 in the breakeven parameter space very near the ignition regime (they have not "gone DT" due to pain in the ass handling issues with the radioactive tritium). There is also always hope for a shocking surprise breakthrough too (but don't hold your breath). For example, 10 or so years ago, it was though there was no way you could get around having to build immensely expensive multi-hundred beam multi-MEGAjoule laser systems in order to make inertial confinement fusion work. Then along comes a cute little trick called Chirped pulse amplification and suddenly you can start talking about petawatt lasers being used to reduce the overall cost of the machine by 10 fold (fast ignition fusion schemes! That's why science is so great, there is always hope something better is just around the corner waiting to be discovered.

A few operational systems listed here: http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/maglevq. htm The first one ever to go into service was apparently on 1 January 2003 in Shanghai, China. For $6.25 you get to go 30km @ 400km/h. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3153

The technology is only expensive cause it isn't being mass produced yet, like everything else before it. As soon as it's adopted, the construction prices of them will drop considerably. As for efficiency of them, I'd have to do some searching locally for links to articles I've read previously, but this might interest you for now, http://www.llnl.gov/str/Post.html . One article I've read showed only a minimal (less than 1% iirc) increase in overall drag when the vehicle's weight was doubled. They're also mentioned on the wikipedia maglev page as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation_t rain

I highly doubt the energy required for these systems would be anywhere near the same for a jet, but then again the speeds would likely be only about 1/3 to 1/2 for the next few decades.

The reason for picking on China is xenophobia, plain, old and simple, dressed up in McCarthy era justifications around communism.

Hardly. The fact is that China is really the only adversary who potentially has the military strength and intent to engage the US. North Korea and Taiwan are both problem areas where the Chinese and American viewpoints are very different. I'm sure European and Middle Eastern countries spy as well, but the US is not going to be invaded by Germany or Jordan.

I'm sure China would just love to get a bunch of bugged PCs into places like the LLNL or NSA. Having a backdoor into the US labs developing missile defence systems would be their dream come true.

Eventually the Taiwan problem is going to have to be resolved. I can see this happening either by the Chinese government eventually becoming more moderate (ideally becoming democratic, but more likely giving up on the hardline Taiwan stance), or by a military conflict (eventually their economic and military strength will reach a level where they will think they can do whatever they want - its just a matter of time). I imagine the hardliners see the latter as the road to "reunification", so its very much in their interest to spy all they can. Lenovo might just be another part of their effort.

"I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine and links the storage nodes to the login node controllers, which then connect to the login nodes themselves (of which there are apparently over 1,400 of, according to this). I couldn't find much information on Federation, as it seems to only be used in a few systems, of which Purple is the most notable. One reference I found seems to put it at 1.49 GB/sec (11.92 Gbit/s) bandwidth, although it's not clear if that's "dual plane" Federation or not. 4X SDR Infiniband is around 10 Gbit/sec, IIRC, so Federation's a little faster."

Did some research and found the following:
http://www.llnl.gov/asc/platforms/purple/configura tion.html
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246978.htm l - Info on the switch used

It appears to be an IBM thing that is only used on these big ASC platforms. The other parts of the company are using InfiniBand quite a bit though.
-Ack

From the articles I've read, this was accomplished using (some subset of) ASC Purple, which is full of a lot of either custom or IBM-proprietary stuff (or else stuff that nobody but IBM seems to be using).

According to the published/unclassified spec sheet:

"Purple has 2 million gigabytes of storage from more than 11,000 Serial ATA and Fibre Channel disks. ... Each login node has eight 10-gigabytes-per-second network connections for parallel file transfer protocol and two 1-gigabyte-per-second network connections for network file systems and secure shell protocol. The system has a three-stage 1,536 port dual plane Federation switch interconnect ..."

I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine and links the storage nodes to the login node controllers, which then connect to the login nodes themselves (of which there are apparently over 1,400 of, according to this). I couldn't find much information on Federation, as it seems to only be used in a few systems, of which Purple is the most notable. One reference I found seems to put it at 1.49 GB/sec (11.92 Gbit/s) bandwidth, although it's not clear if that's "dual plane" Federation or not. 4X SDR Infiniband is around 10 Gbit/sec, IIRC, so Federation's a little faster.

It does sound a little like it was a case of "hey, what can we do with $230M worth of hardware? I know, let's break some records." So they did. I'm not sure that there's anything there that anyone else couldn't do, with different technologies, given the same investment of capital -- it's just a matter of who else wants to, and has the capability.

From the articles I've read, this was accomplished using (some subset of) ASC Purple, which is full of a lot of either custom or IBM-proprietary stuff (or else stuff that nobody but IBM seems to be using).

According to the published/unclassified spec sheet:

"Purple has 2 million gigabytes of storage from more than 11,000 Serial ATA and Fibre Channel disks. ... Each login node has eight 10-gigabytes-per-second network connections for parallel file transfer protocol and two 1-gigabyte-per-second network connections for network file systems and secure shell protocol. The system has a three-stage 1,536 port dual plane Federation switch interconnect ..."

I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine and links the storage nodes to the login node controllers, which then connect to the login nodes themselves (of which there are apparently over 1,400 of, according to this). I couldn't find much information on Federation, as it seems to only be used in a few systems, of which Purple is the most notable. One reference I found seems to put it at 1.49 GB/sec (11.92 Gbit/s) bandwidth, although it's not clear if that's "dual plane" Federation or not. 4X SDR Infiniband is around 10 Gbit/sec, IIRC, so Federation's a little faster.

It does sound a little like it was a case of "hey, what can we do with $230M worth of hardware? I know, let's break some records." So they did. I'm not sure that there's anything there that anyone else couldn't do, with different technologies, given the same investment of capital -- it's just a matter of who else wants to, and has the capability.

Crap. Teach me for not scouring my preview before submitting. Here's the PDF I intended to link to:

http://www.llnl.gov/asc/platforms/purple/sc2005-pu rple.pdf

Actually, the z-machine is a relatively cheap device. 100's of millions instead of billions. Much cheaper than other fusion test devices like NIF http://www.llnl.gov/nif/ or ITER http://www.iter.org/

These are multi-billion dollar devices.

Yes. After the collapse of the USSR, a lot of the scientists from there were employed to work in NASA to prevent them from working on nuclear weapons in other countries.

It's hard to google for such things, but the first link is:

http://www.llnl.gov/str/JanFeb05/Zucca.html

Which in the first paragraph explains it better than I can.

Comparing pictures of this KEK Blue Gene with pictures of Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene/L, what strikes me is ... one of them appears to be upside-down.

Any logic to this? Or is the idea that when they add another gazillion processors to each one, they will be able to meet up nicely somewhere over the Pacific.

Yes. Not only that, they're great for applications where keeping a tight seal is important - for example, gas centrifuges. Often gas centrifuges will have the lower bearing be physically supported and the upper bearing magnetically supported.

There have been some interesting spinoffs of magnetic bearings, too. For example, Inductrac maglev, which was based on research by a group of scientists who were previously making self-contained magnetically suspended flywheels for energy storage.

Before we get into any discussions about replacing {coal/oil} with {nuclear/solar/wind/biomass} in the US, everybody look at the chart here.

The biggest thing that jumps out at you from this chart is that increasing nuclear power won't decrease our use of oil. Current rhetoric from the Bush administration about nuclear power aiding energy independence is just that, rhetoric, and that won't change without massive restructuring of the US energy system. Similar rhetoric about replacing oil with solar or wind power is also nonsense.

What it will do is reduce our use of coal, and maybe allow some natural gas to be shifted away from electricity towards heating and industrial use.

Besides do not forget that you need a lot of current to charge a very small capacitor very fast! Modern minimal sized transistors can switching a 10 to 100mA each. These currents have to go through a almost 100nm with (copper)line. That are still high current densities!

Going back on topic, the real amazing thing is that they can make very small lines (30nm) with light of a much larger wave length! Currently the industry can make 65nm lines using light with 193nm wavelenght! Think about it, this is line with a size of 1/3 of the wave length used! IBM has probably used 157nm wavelength to make 30nm lines, which means an factor of 5!

Using much smaller wavelengths is a problem there the light (if you can still call it that) will be absorbed instead of transmitted by conventional lenses. See for example http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sween.html for more info.

Thus special (expensive) lenses are needed when using Extreme-UV. The real news in this article is that it they made it possible with 'conventional' lenses and light sources!

I'll see your five year old national geographic fluff piece, and raise you a two year old government study.

simulations of iron fertilization of the oceans in the Southern Hemisphere initially showed that almost 8 billion tons of carbon would be absorbed by the ocean each year. Yet, after 500 years of continuous fertilization, the net increase in absorption would be less than 1 billion tons of carbon per year.

Now, considering that fossil fuels contribute roughly 4-5 billion tons of C to the atmosphere annually, and we've got about 100 years of fossil fuels left... How in the hell is this not a perfect solution? Oh yeah, that's right... too many global warming chicken littles out there are going to have egg on their face if atmospheric C is reduced to pre-industrial levels and global temps are still rising thanks to the simple fact that the sun is getting hotter. We wouldn't want to actually test that "greenhouse gases cause global warming" theory, now would we? Better just stick to those computer models...

Oh no! I'm challenging global warming rhetoric with scientific studies! Damn!! There goes my Karma! *sniff* Goodbye sweet Karma <sarcasm />

And then there are a handful of us who majored in environmental science in college who think that computer models are as susceptible to subjective modelers as computer benchmarks are to industry types trying to sell you their latest processor. Large majority eh? Got any relevant links? I'm not going to pick on you specifically MightyMartian, because there are a lot of people here racking up +5's with nothing but rhetoric. Here's why I think this global warming business is a sham.

The soil releases an order of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the fossil fuels burned each year combined. No till farming in America could take as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking half of all the cars in America off the road. A full 40% of the Earth's arable land is being used for agriculture and most of it is being severely degraded by tillage. Why aren't you people up in arms about that? Hey, burn the f'in farmers right? They're greedy evil bastards.

Studies have shown that fertilizing plankton with iron sulfate could significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. (IronEx II is a notable success.) "Oh teh Noes!!11oneone1eleventyone! After 500 years it wont teh wurk anymore!?ONE" Well gee, we'll be out of fossil fuels by then. So why aren't you guys who are belly aching about global warming doing it? Afraid you'll have egg on your face if CO2 drops and mean temps continue to rise? What you say? Your models might be flawed?

Wow, the Sun IS getting hotter, and Earth's temperature correlates directly with it.

And as for plastics, we can make most of that out of corn and it's more environmentally friendly. Most of the crowd around here loves parroting each other with this global warming chicken little horseshit, but I personally am sick to death of hearing it. Produce something besides a BBC article written in layman's terms that says the sky is falling, PLEASE! I thought this was news for nerds, not drama queens.

Would anyone like to provide a little evidence to the contrary that is not entirely based on a computer model?

Plutonium is really not very toxic. See here for a quick overview and here for a more detailed view of the radiation danger in particular.

As near as I can tell, chemical toxicity is barely a concern, and radioactive concerns are vastly overblown.

As to your contention that microsoft gets a pass because nobody thought of security back "then", I'll take "then" to be the 10 years immediately prior to the release of Windows 3.0. Multi-user PCs were a well-known concept to every student who's done work in the general-population 'computer lab'. Remember Banyan, Appletalk, Netware (you mentioned it)? They may not have been Microsoft products, but they were ubiquitous. Unix workstations (Apollo, Sun, Microvax, etc.) were in very common use among engineers and product designers, and they all were networked. (of course, most unixes and VMS versions were very hackable, but that was part of the fun)

What's more, there were thousands of anti-mal-ware software products for MS-DOS, some samples here. The virus vector was BBS downloads and floppy disks rather than open port attacks or browser overruns, but the concept of attacking PCs was already well known. So, no, Microsoft does not "get a pass" for a security problem that nobody could have predicted (sarcasm). They made conscious choices to de-emphasize and ignore security in order to maintain market share at all costs. The economics proved them correct, so far, but they still should carry the blame for those choices.

1. This means you have a dedicated admin machine that only a few very trustworthy admins have access to, that is very secure (no root logins, firewalled heavily, patched often, etc). I highly recommend running SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 with the IBM EAL4+ Security Configuration
   All maintenance activities are run from this management server.
2. Use the Parallel Distributed SHell (PDSH) utilities: http://www.llnl.gov/linux/pdsh/pdsh.html. These allow you run commands or copy files to a single system, a group of systems, or all systems at the same time. Wondering what kernel all your systems are running? Just issue a `pdsh -a uname -a`. Need to copy out the sudoers file? `pdcp -a /home/admin/node_files/sudoers /etc/sudoers`
3. Run Ganglia for resource monitoring: http://ganglia.info/
4. Run Samhain for filesystem integrity scanning on all servers: http://la-samhna.de/samhain/
5. Host based firewalls for all servers: http://www.shorewall.net/
6. Power supplies have caused more instability in my experience than any other single hardware component. Buy both good equipment and buy systems with dual redundant hot-swappable power supplies for the important machines
7. Good deals can be had from the big vendors. Although we run a lot of whitebox and IBM equipment, Sun currently has a great system for a very cheap price (starts at $745): http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x2100/.
8. NFS sucks, but is the best filesystem glue-layer available. It is very sensitive to high latency environments, so run it over Infiniband (it has very low latency, and massive bandwidth (5us, 1.25GB/s) if you need to sqeeze out the best performance.
9. Every system should have an electronic "system book", which contains the full hardware specs, including where each part gets service from (if bought separately), how long the warranty lasts (give end dates), contact info, etc. If you are managing 50 or less systems, keep track of all changes in a central location, otherwise track all changes by using a system which scales (even a handwritten script and DB table would be sufficient).
10. Good enough is the enemy of the Best, but that is a good thing. Never overengineer a solution, this only means that other problems go unsolved.

I find it interesting no one has questioned this statistic more fully. Considering that it was widely publizied that chimpanzees proved only to be 95.9 (including insertion/deletion) identical, that the 97.5% for a mouse seems a bit inaccurate. Looking, I found only one place so far, http://www.llnl.gov/str/Stubbs.html that mentioned the comparitive percentage. It being 85%. This may be wrong, but a citing of the above statistic used in the article would have been nice.

Hmm. Can't wait until Apache becomes mature and pragmatic. Or Debian, and Slackware too. And all those immature projects on Sourceforge. When that happens well, by golly, you'll probably see these eccentric oddities at Lawrence Livermore Labs or running on Cray hardware.

If they were really mature and pragmatic, they just might make it into government use, or even become more commonplace.

We can only patiently wait for that wonderful maturity and pragmatism to blossom. Until then we should be thankful that we are skillfully guided by the benign monopolists. They only have our best interests at heart.

Self Contained Nuclear Power Generator

"Transient nonequilibrium burning systems [are ruled out] which try to produce enough fusion power before the particle distributions equiligrate (eg. ICF, bombs, and pulsed beam methods)."

That is bizzare. I'm really at a loss to explain such a statement, though, IANAP. Obviously fusion bombs work and DO produce far more energy than they consume and ICF is capable of doing the same or this would not be currently under construction. I can't understand what he may have meant by such a statement. weird.

From some recent experiences with the mpiblast project, and some much older work at llnl I've had better experiences with mpich as being more reliable than lam (one man's limited opinion, a data point not a rule). Also I think it should be more clear that mpiblast is perfectly usable in numa architectures. On first read of the parent I thought this was being ruled out. When debugging in parallel Totalview is a godsend, or was the last time I needed/could afford it. For geek points I'd have to agree that the worms remind me of Sarlacc.

"This particular machine is of course targeted at LANL, and weapons development (oops, did I say that? I mean 'stockpile stewardship')"

Just to expand on that, it is worth noting that the ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer at LLNL was the first to run a fully three dimensional simulation of a nuclear trigger (plutonium fission) implosion and shortly thereafter was the first to run a full 3D simulation of the secondary fusion stage in a thermonuclear device. This computer was capable of ~3 teraflops and took something like 20 days to run those sims. Blue Gene is ~100 times faster than that computer and judging from the time it took ASCI White (~10 Tflops) to complete a simulation of a full thermonuclear detonation, it would therefore probably not be unreasonable to assume this new computer is capable of full 3D simulation of a complete thermonuclear bomb detonation (primary and secondary) in mere hours to a couple days. It is a shame that we even "need" nuclear weapons, but if we're going to have them I for one would much rather see tests of them done in silicon instead of in a big mushroom cloud!

Yes, it is also sad that while other countries use thier supercomputing power mostly to investigate protien folding and earthquake propagation and other purposes generally recognized as peaceful we mainly use ours for simulation nuclear weapons designs; but it is not all bad. The simulations of imploding fusion fuel can (and will) also be used to simulate the implosion of the tiny fusion microcapsules which are imploded in laboratory laserfusion facilities like NIF. This has the potential to eventually result in laserfusion (inertial confinement fusion) as a power source. Supercomputers which were mainly intended to be used for weapons research in the past have occasionally also served up a few surprises in completely unrelated fields. The supercomputer Cray X-MP (?) at Sandia (?) labs in the mid 80s was where the first simulations of the giant impact theory of the formation of the moon were validated. Its now the predominant theory of the moon's origin. It is hard to imagine that this new computer won't have a few surprises of its own to reveal even if it only donates a small amount of time to non-defense related research.

UWB's data capacity, speed, low power requirements, and resistance to interference have attracted the attention of major electronic corporations who recognize the technology's commercial potential. Because UWB can penetrate walls, it could become the center of all communications within homes and small offices. UWB signals could carry voice, data, and video. Products could speed downloading images from a digital camera to a computer, connecting printers to computers, and routing high-definition signals to televisions. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) currently restricts commercial UWB applications to between 3.1 and 10.6 gigahertz because of a concern they could interfere with existing transmissions, especially flight radios, beacons, and the Global Positioning System. FCC rules also limit UWB commercial devices to less than 1 watt, which prevents them from working beyond a relatively short distance (about 10 meters).

Using an experimental license, Livermore has developed numerous UWB systems in frequency bands ranging from 200 megahertz to 100 gigahertz. Tests at Livermore have shown that the devices do not cause undue interference with other electronic devices operating in this broad frequency range. Livermore efforts are directed at developing UWB devices for the government that operate both above and below the 3.1- to 10.6-gigahertz band designated for commercial devices.

While the idea of black holes, dark matter, etc seems intringing, it is still a lot of theory. It is nice to see that people haven't given up, but that's not to say that this article is just as much speculation as the next.

With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for ... instead of killing each other? I know that we already have the answer, but 42 only answers the ultimate question, we can't even answer the simple things like "do black holes exist?"

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Lee.html

"With all these different colors, it's now possible to make light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from quantum dots," says Lee. "We've come up with a process so easy you can almost do it in your garage. We can put these dots in a polymer and make thin films that are 1,000- to 2,000-angstroms thick. This means we can create precisely tuned blue or green LEDs."

What are we doing with them? Scientific Visualization.

Scrub will do the job as well.

Sure, they've fixed a bunch. This is the first release that'll run on OS X 10.4, for instance (so, yes, I've had production releases of my code using pre-release snapshots of Qt3.3.5, as Qt 3.3.4 doesn't run on Tiger). (emphasis mine)

Huh? I have software running on Tiger right now that's using Qt 3.3.4. And not the X11 version.

How does this differ from work at Livermore that has been in progress (sic) since the beginning of recorded time.

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Verdon.html
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Petawatt.html

etc.

How does this differ from work at Livermore that has been in progress (sic) since the beginning of recorded time.

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Verdon.html
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Petawatt.html

etc.

Lawrence Livermore has a nice review of their laser fusion projects, Some stadium sized: http://www.llnl.gov/str/September02/September50th. html

I don't know who will make the next great human acheivment, but I do know this : it has nothing to do with space travel

ITER or NIF will lay the seeds that will one day free humanity from oil dependence.

Why a manhattan style project is not launched immediately to break the energy gridlock is beyond me. It's the most crucial issue facing humanity.

Space is great, but when this dude was a kid, oil was cheap and plentiful. Deal with the big problem first, I say.

Geez, we've been doing this since the early 80's, big deal. Why don't they give more attention to something interesting like fusion research at the National Ignition Facility. Now that's cutting edge research, boldly measuring energies that no physicist has measured before!

The regenerative fuel cell, coupled with lightweight hydrogen storage, had by far the highest energy density--about 450 watt-hours per kilogram--ten times that of lead-acid batteries and more than twice that forecast for any chemical batteries.

This isn't exactly a simulation of melting, but it does involve simulation at a similar molecular level. The work that Fred Streitz and co. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are doing explores the processes involved in the rapid resolidification of tantalum. They're reproducing, from first principles, some basic materials results like grain boundaries and such. It's one of the largest (if not the largest) simulation running the the world's largest supercomputer. One of my team members is doing the visualization work for it.

It shows that what many may consider to be a very simple process that is well explored and understood at a high school science class level is actually a very complex process when taken down to the molecular level. There is still a good amount of science to be done in the fundamentals of materials modeling. See this for somewhat related work and some cool pictures (if I do say so myself :-).

This isn't exactly a simulation of melting, but it does involve simulation at a similar molecular level. The work that Fred Streitz and co. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are doing explores the processes involved in the rapid resolidification of tantalum. They're reproducing, from first principles, some basic materials results like grain boundaries and such. It's one of the largest (if not the largest) simulation running the the world's largest supercomputer. One of my team members is doing the visualization work for it.

It shows that what many may consider to be a very simple process that is well explored and understood at a high school science class level is actually a very complex process when taken down to the molecular level. There is still a good amount of science to be done in the fundamentals of materials modeling. See this for somewhat related work and some cool pictures (if I do say so myself :-).

This isn't exactly a simulation of melting, but it does involve simulation at a similar molecular level. The work that Fred Streitz and co. at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are doing explores the processes involved in the rapid resolidification of tantalum. They're reproducing, from first principles, some basic materials results like grain boundaries and such. It's one of the largest (if not the largest) simulation running the the world's largest supercomputer. One of my team members is doing the visualization work for it.

It shows that what many may consider to be a very simple process that is well explored and understood at a high school science class level is actually a very complex process when taken down to the molecular level. There is still a good amount of science to be done in the fundamentals of materials modeling. See this for somewhat related work and some cool pictures (if I do say so myself :-).

The policy used to be that the results of all publicly-funded research were public domain.

Now, only the results which are given to the government are available, and only to the government. The researcher is only required to give the requested research results to the government, and the government only gets the right to use the results within the government.

The researcher can keep private data and procedures created during the research. Makes it kind of hard to confirm the results.

For example, there has been a refusal to disclose details behind the "hockey stick" global warming graph. And right now a U.S. government contractor is busy running climate simulations for a U.N. global warming group, and the latter gets to choose what to publish. Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

Actually, Parallel Make (i.e. gmake -j, http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/paralle l_make.html, or pmake, http://www.llnl.gov/icc/lc/DEG/pmake/pmake.html) can make project builds significantly faster.

Yes, but the poster I was responding to was talking about building a single source file (the one just modified, usually) and linking it. "make -j" doesn't do anything useful if there aren't multiple source files out of date.

I agree with the rest of your comments.