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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."
there was an interesting article in Wired a couple of months ago. It said that very few of our scientists working on nuclear projects had first hand experience with actual testing. I guess this can bring the newer guys up to speed.
Makes you wonder what the government has that its /not/ telling us about... heh
I wonder what the computing power of SETI@home is. Could such a thing be done with a distributed system across home machines? If a program like this was run on people's computers who had broadband it might be possible to do something similar. The military could even use a system such as this. Since no one has all the program data no secrets would be let out. Everyone is just doing small computations that a larger computer somewhere puts together to make something useful. Hmm......
ahh, the egg in the basket..
The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress.
:)
The Library of Congress was an interesting comparison back when CD-ROM drives were first becoming popular 10 years ago, and laymen had no clue about the storage capabilities of computers. Now it's just plain stupid.
Imagine if hard drives were specd in KLOCs - thousands of libraries of congress.
This kind of software if it would escape the lab (and the past has proven more than enough that anything that can escape will escape, remember those missing harddrives) combined with the pc's that you can buy at fry's in a few years time will allow any rogue nation to design their own without wisening anybody else because they no longer have to test their stuff in order to reach a high level of confidence that it will work in practice. Now at least we KNOW that Pakistan and India have the bomb (they probably wanted us to know, but there are some that do not want you to know until they hit you).
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We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we respect other nations' sovereignty.
Has anyone ever noticed that national sovereignty and international law are mutually exclusive? This poster appears to be supporting both. When the rubber meets the road, where do most Slashdotters stand on this issue? I think they stand firmly on the side of international law. And that seriously scares me.
Discuss.
No there won't, and if you had bothered to read the article closely, or you followed world politics at all, you'd know there has been an international ban on testing nuclear weapons since 1992.
If you bothered to follow *US* politics at all, you'd know that the US Senate voted against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, so it doesn't apply to the US.
Atmospheric testing has been banned since the early '60s. All testing is/was done underground.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I agree with 90% of what you said, so I'll nitpick on the 10%.
Given enough fissionables, any nation can make something that goes BOOM.
For any given BOOM, the quantity that constitutes "enough" is directly proportional to the skill of that nation's weapons designers.
If you're a rogue nation, busily accumulating fissionables for your bombmakers, being stuck with a bad design is gonna delay your bombmaking effort for a few years, and once you have "enough" for a bomb, you won't be able to build as many of 'em.
Inasmuch as we can observe signs of weapons production, the smaller "enough" is for them, the harder that job is, and the less likely it is that we'll be able to do anything about it before it's Too Late.
Although it's not enough to stop proliferation, I believe that limiting the ability of rogue nations to improve their weapons design is a significant and ongoing part of nonproliferation.
1 Library of Congress == 10 terabytes of text!.
That's a little hard to believe - I figure 10TB would be on the order of 20 billion printed pages of text.
I would be interested to know how long this machine takes to find primes etc.