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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."
Will countries still want to test nuclear weapons? Of course. A computer may be able to *stimulate* things, but it is *never* a replacement for the actual event. If anything - this will help in the design and initial testing, but when it all comes down to the wire, there will still be 'real' testing required.
they weren't kidding....
seriously tho, 30teraflops is impressive... we need to put this to work on the cancer research projects as well.. can't let the nuke boys have all the fun..
doesnt it sadden any of you that the sole purpose of this is to find out how to more effectivly kill more innocent civilian lives?
Can you break this sort of problem down that easily? I would think there is too much interdependency between cells - which would mean a lot of communication needed across the network.
0xB
Its primary purpose is to replace nuclear testing that has been banned for ten years -- ten years of having NO idea how the existing warhead supply is aging.
You may agree or disagree with their intended use, but right or wrong there are two critically important things that we have to know as long as a single warhead still exists.
1) As the parts age, will it work as designed, when it needs to go off
2) As the parts age, will it work as designed, when we sure as hell don't want it to.
In either case, failure carries terrifying outcomes. Think about it -- in one case, the warhead doesn't detonate completely, causing an incredible amount of fallout (Chernobyl-style), which is never the intent of a nuclear warhead. In the other case, people dye (very likely in a similarly polluting manner) when it goes off unexpectedly.
As long as nuclear warheads exist, this sort of research is absolutely critical, and its not anyones place to put down this research for ethical reasons related to the existance of the bomb. The two are related but totally separate, and you shouldn't cross those beams.
The fact that this was the sane option says a lot about the US, and little of it is good.
There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!
There are sound engineering/technical reasons, which military tech buffs are fond of pointing out, why it would be safe/acceptable to make controlled use of nuclear weapons. The military tech buffs are probably right as far as that goes, which isn't very far. If we're serious about controlling the proliferation of suitcase nukes we have to act multilaterally.
Improving our nuke arsenal - especially after the foreign press has been filled with ill conceived threats/discussions of the possibility that we might use it - is shameful and stupid. We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.
What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.
Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
- analyze the human genome,
- fold cancer-curing proteins,
- locate possible sources of alien intelligence, or
- help the government explode a virtual nuke?
(No nastiness intended. My point is that it might be hard to get people to download a client with that particular goal in mind.)If the nuke project had a screen saver of cool mushroom clouds, blast waves and other eye candy people would be all over it.
They could give a shit if it meant speeding up the extermination of homo sapiens.
there are several issues that would preclude this type of computation being run in a SETI@home context. First broadband is very slow compared to what the interconnects on these clusters run. The small 64 node cluster we run has gig-ether on a non-blocking 64 port foundary switch - still slower than what is on the proprietary IBM sp machines. Even with that fast of an interconnect these types of computations tend to be i/o bound.
Also data size would be a contributing factor. In many of the gasseous simulations we run it is not uncommon to have multi-gigabyte data sets (in fact we have even had more than one request for multi-terabyte storage - we didn't have that much on the entier cluster). Not only is this hard to transfer/maintain in a timely manner on a broadband connection the home users machine would have trouble with it. Most hard drives out there could withstand it even when full of mp3's but you also have to take into account what data needs in memory at one time. Most new computation clusters have at least a gig of high speed ram in them and it is still not really enough.
And lastly as far a secrets go, you will not need the entier data set to glean information from the data. Just the algorithms used to process the data may be classified (if they simulate our nuclear weapons well enough you will probably learn something classified about thier construction).
oh, yea, unless the algorithm in question is ridicuosly parrallel there is a lot more going on than small computations that a larger computer puts together going on. Computations such as SETI@home are a very narrow type of distributed computation and does not occur very frequently.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Running programs in parallel is pretty difficult; you have to figure out how to divide the problem amongst different processors. Some problems (which are said to be `embarrassingly parallel') are easy to do this -- every different processor just searches a different part of key-space for a key to decrypt a code, or a different part of frequency-space looking for a signal. There doesn't have to be any sort of inter-process communication to speak of in these problems.
A fluids or mechanical (or combined) simulation, however, requires lots of communication between computational elements. Each processor is simulating some region of space, and it constantly needs information about the fluid all around it to know what to do next. (Is a shock wave coming from the left?)
And even fluids/mechanics simulations are simpler than simulations involving long-range forces like gravity. In that case, every single computational element probably needs at least some information from every other computational element!
In cases like that, highly-distributed computing a la SETI@home won't work. Whereas for brute-force code-cracking, or searching for signals in reams of indepdendant data, it's perfect.
Now don't take me wrong. I appreciate how much of a technical marvel this is, but ....
The test ban was enacted so that nations would STOP designing better planet-busters. Now we have shown that it is possible for people to design nukes in thier basement (assuming their basement has a 12 teraflop computer).
Should we feel any more secure knowing that India and Pakistan can now quietly design better atomic arsenals to annihilate each other with?
If they've already built the thing, how can it be 3x faster than "the most powerful computer in existence today"?
Considering this machine could brute-force many current password schemes in seconds, the answer to "could it check my email" may be a disheartening "Yes". Kinda makes you wonder what they have this thing doing when it's not crunching physics equations...
Yes america does a lot of things while it is convenient. They sign treaties and then when it isn't convinient anymore they break them. To hell with whether it is for the common good or not.
America signs a trade agreement to lower tariffs, sometime down the track it is not "convienent" so they put the tariffs up anyway and screw some smaller country. America treat their detainee's inhumanely and claim that, technically, they are not POW's, so they are not bound by the Geneva convention. Because they aren't POW's does that mean they aren't human and should not be protected by that convention?
This is why there are people who don't like the USA.... This is why some people crash planes into buildings... and this is why some people are not sorry about it.... arrogance, and hypocracy... this is why people dislike the USA.
-- Cut and paste is not code re-use!
Wait...you don't see seti@home as a tremendous resource sink? Hmm. Protein folding would have been a decent example. Searching for little green men that aren't there is a lousy example.
Writers imply. Readers infer.