Slashdot Mirror
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're not innocent, they're potential terrorists and therefore evil
0xB
It'd never work. While the idea is nice and warm and fuzzy, it's utter bullshit. What you're talking about is already being done. It's called diplomacy. Can you honestly imagine people donig this? Do you think Israel and Palastine would agree to such a game, and if so, what purpose would it serve? It definately wouldn't stop their people from killing each other no matter the outcome.
What if we were to engage in a war with So-Damn Insane (leader of Iraq)? We would tromp him hands-down, but what are the odds he would agree to whatever the terms after he lost? What would force him to acknowledge defeat, another computer battle? Puh-lease.
Face it, wars work. Wars are terrible, despicable crimes against humanity, but they work. If Hitler and the Axis Powers had lost the Second World War (and it was conducted via computer), do you honestly think they'd have stopped and not invaded Poland or France? What if they'd won and claimed Poland and France as their own? Do you really think that the citizens of the country wouldn't rebel and create an utter anarchy?
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
"Why isn't this processor farm being used for, say, bacterial genomics?"
You'd rather have potentially defective nuclear weapons at our disposal than advancing bacteria research?
I can see it now: "The United States was forced to launch a nuclear assault on Iraq today. Unfortunately, the first bomb that went off was powerful enough to scare birds away. In live television address, Saddam Hussein's speech was surprisingly short. 'Ha ha!', he said as he pointed in the general direction of the United States."
There's a pretty big difference between modelling a nuclear explosion (or an explosion of any kind) and performing Seti like research. For one thing, Seti can divvy up the data to process into really small chunks, making it easy to distribute it across a number of machines.
This cannot be done with an explosion of any kind. The reason is that you have LOTS of particles interacting with each other. For each interaction, every single particle needs to be re-calculated. This is why you cannot divvy up the data and spread it across a lot of machines. This is why you need to use a computer like this to do the calculation.
I'm not sure what kind of math is done for genome related stuff, so I cannot really comment on that. I'm willing to bet, though, they could spread it across as many machines as they need. If they need a machine like the one being used in this article, they could probably lease run time off it.
"Derp de derp."