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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."
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..
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
No, because that's not the only thing it's for. It's also used to simulate the effects of aging on our nuclear arsenal without having to actually detonate any bomb, which is a good thing.
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.
- 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?
I think it is very sad. There seems to be a double standard here, It's ok for USA to do Nuclear tests but not other countries (how ever the are conducted). I mean, Americans can feel all warm and fuzzy about not doing acutal tests, but are they really any better than the Indians, Pakistanis or the French, just becasue they can simulate them? Wasn't the intent of stopping nuclear tests, in part, to slow the development of nuclear weapons.... I think it is a very hyporitical move on the part of the US of A. If America can test nuclear weapons why should not other counties be able to do so too....
-- Cut and paste is not code re-use!