ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb

totallygeek writes "Redefining the term vaporware, research scientists at Lost Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs detonated two computer simulations. ASCI White, the world's fastest supercomputer, ran the simulations of nuclear explosions. Scientists can now study nuclear weapon replacement components without violating the nuclear test ban, in effect since 1992. Each simulation used more than 6.6 million CPU hours, which would take home machines 1000 years to complete. The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress. ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops. The seven month research project ended last Friday, and now the system is ready for use, after its sucessful testing."

Comments

First 3D simulation...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the original subject for this post was a bit misleading. This was the first 3d simulation of a nuclear explosion. There have been many previous simulations of nuclear explosions, only they were limited to 2d plots of data. Nuclear explosion and fallout simulation has been the major purpose of supercomputing at Livermore and Los Alamos for decades.

This article was posted not long ago...

[SevenTowers]

Consistency please HERE

and yet

[Edmund Blackadder]

Congress did not ratify the nuclear test ban treaty.

The only way i can explain this is that some people actually want other countries to develop nuclear capabilities. Which is not that far fetched actually.

Re:SETI@home

[spullara]

It's pretty easy to find out what the computing power of Seti@Home is, just check the totals to find that in the last 24 hours, on average, the computer was running at 96.79 teraflops. Only 8x that of ASCI White.

Re:OT: International Law vs. Sovereignty? (was Re:

[Bearpaw]

Has anyone ever noticed that national sovereignty and international law are mutually exclusive?

Only if you take them both as absolutes, and believe that countries can't sign onto any international law treaties without giving up all of their sovereignty.

Does agreeing to abide by state and federal law mean that individuals give up all their individual rights and freedoms? No, of course not.

Same thing.

A Misuse of Compute!

[mr_don't]

When I was working in a Bacterial Genomics lab, I used to crave faster, more powerful computers to crunch through genomic data. This type of computing power is a dream for bioinformaticists who want to, for example, create targeted cures for bacterial disease based on specific genetic idioms.

What is unfortunate is that we have an expensive, tax-payer funded processor farm that is dedicated to the useless pursuit of studying weapons of mass destruction. A great text about the myths of US nuclear policy can be found in Michio Kaku's (with Dan Axelrod) To Win a Nuclear War. It's in the style of a book like "The Hacker Crackdown", well researched, and really interesting.

If you are interested in stopping Nuclear Weapons Research in the US, another great site is that of Nobel Peace Prize Winning group Intl. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). I think it's telling to compare IPPNW's site to the Defense Department's Moronic Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team web site!

Re:And this benefits mankind how?

[OS24Ever]

This cannot be done with an explosion of any kind. The reason is that you have LOTS of particles interacting with each other. For each interaction, every single particle needs to be re-calculated. This is why you cannot divvy up the data and spread it across a lot of machines. This is why you need to use a computer like this to do the calculation.

I just wanted to clarify something for people thinking 'But isn't ASCII White a bunch of machines?'

Yes, It is. But they are tightly intercoupled with an IBM SP Switch that has something like 300MB (Yes, Mega BYTE) second non-blocking throughput to handle the internode communication, both at the rack (16 machine) and cluster (In ASCII White's case, it's 128 racks I believe, 128 racks of 16 4-way Power3 SPs, I've been in the same room with it but didn't touch it/work on it/have anything to do with it except go 'whoa' when someone pointed it out to me) I'm probably wrong on the interconnect speed, I think it's much faster now. I'm a bit behind on IBM's SP stuff. Spend to much time watching Myrinet.

I'd like to take a gander at the parallel coding that was done to get this kind of simulation. This can't be a batch mode program (like distributed.net and seti) like you said. It'd be quite facinating, though I'm sure they'd shoot you after you read it for that Top Secret stuff.

Re:No its not...

[Detritus]

Actually I do believe that a nuclear device cannot detonate "accidentally."

That is not true. Early nuclear weapons designs had severe safety problems by modern standards. It took many years of engineering and testing to solve the problems. A Hiroshima type bomb can be made to go critical by immersing it in water. A Nagasaki type bomb can explode with a measurable nuclear yield if the high-explosive lens assembly is detonated by fire or shockwave.

Neutron Bombs aren't good bunker busters

[billstewart]

Neutron bombs are designed to output a large blast of radiation so you can kill people quickly without turning the target into a glowing uninhabitable wasteland or creating major fallout. Specifically, they're designed for applications like nuking Russian soldiers and tanks in Germany and Poland without having to destroy Europe in order to save it.

Bunker busters are also lower yield than city busters, but that's because there are times you want to make a 100-ton or 1 kiloton hole in the ground without having to haul in a kiloton of high explosive or making a 20kiloton Hiroshima-sized hole in the ground and wiping out the city. Similarly, "Tactical nuke" is defined as "Designed for use in Germany" -- some of the nuclear cannon shells are designed for taking out Russian tank forces without wasting the country.

But yes, both of these are relatively scary, in that they lower the threshold for nuclear use to some thinkable, as opposed to Mutually Assured Destruction. This did deter the Russians, but it also made it easier for the US to step on Russian satellites so it wasn't decreasing the chance of war, just changing the terms and the probable battlegrounds.