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"Cplant" Parallel Computing Tool
SEWilco writes "Sandia National Laboratories has released its "Cplant" massively parallel processing software. This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters. This is now number 2 on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL.
We discussed this in a Linux clusters discussion and several earlier reports as ASCI Red grew."
A standalone non-clustered one of these.
In order to simulate new weapons configurations, it takes an awful lot of computing power. Just try to imagine all the factors that have to be tracked and taken into account in order to produce an accurrate and thorough simulation. Simulated tests have a lot of advantages, obvious (no radiation) and non-obvious (costs).
You've been reading YRO too much. Trust me. The government has a lot better uses to put its supercomputers to than breaking our SSH and PGP keys--like big guns and bombs for laying waste to the known world!
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I've never worked in one of the supercomputer-happy departments at Sandia, but here's a few applications I've talked with others about:
Nuclear simulation: This is the big one. With popular opinion and world politics the way it is, it's likely we won't set off another thermonuclear detonation for a very long time. Unfortunately, we have a few thousand warheads that are aging and decaying, and we want to be sure (and make everyone else sure) that our final deterrent isn't turning into duds under our noses. This is pretty much the sole official justification for the national labs' supercomputing programs.
More nuclear simulation: After New Mexico's devastating summer fires last year, they stepped up research on the effects of fire on stored warheads (no, they won't go nuclear, but cleanup could still be awful). Simulating something that turbulent isn't easy, but it'll be nice to know if there are any further precautions Los Alamos needs to take.
Computational Fluid Dynamics - refining supercomputer code to cut down on the need for even more expensive wind tunnel time. Military and civilian uses: the two I saw were hypersonic parachute unfolding for bombers and drag-reducing plastic attachments for big rig trucks.
Impact testing - this is one of the big commercial apps of supercomputers; I don't know how much of it they're doing at Sandia right now. You can make vehicles a lot more crash safe cheaply if you can virtually destroy them (and refine their frame designs) hundreds of times before actually mangling hardware.
As for crypto breaking... no. For example, the Teraflops has 9 or 10,000 processors (just upgraded to 3xx Mhz Xeons, I'm told, since those are the fastest things that could be massaged into the old PPro sockets) - That's on the order of how many distributed net computers brute forced 64 bit encryption... so for 128 bit encryption you'd just need 16 quintillion more Teraflops supercomputers. Your PGP key is infinitely more likely to be snagged by some hacker's trojan and keylogger than it is by a government supercomputer.
And, I quote: "This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters." This is a pretty big over-statement. From exploring their site, it seems pretty clear that, while they made a few scalability enhancements (like cutting out the TCP/IP stuff, etc), they're main goal was to make large commodity cluster systems (Beowulf or not) more usable. They made a lot of good progress in this area by porting over several tools from their learning experience with ASCI Red. I also found it funny that their "commodity machine" had a custom-made myrinet switch. I think it must be hard to resist the "if we don't have it, we'll build it" mentality of a National Lab. Very cool. Oh, and I'm not sure when the source was put up, but from what I can tell, the site hasn't been updated in almost a year.
here! Enjoy!
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