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ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb

Posted by Hemos on from the ka-WHAM dept.

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."

5 of 551 comments (clear)

  1. Whoa... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Makes you wonder what the government has that its /not/ telling us about... heh

  2. SETI@home by Partisan01 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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..
  3. Rods to the hogshead... by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. :)

  4. Re:The spirit of the law by Tackhead · · Score: 3, Interesting
    > Limiting the ability to *design* nuclear weapons also doesn't really limit a nation's ability to *get* nuclear weapons,

    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.

  5. I looked this up... by seanadams.com · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.