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.

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.