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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."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
set up us the bomb!
But who needs a simulation? If you have an Athlon, just jiggle the fan off and watch the thing in real life!
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
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
What IS the sound of a 12-teraflop machine crashing with the power of 20 megatons? :)
Oh wait, their massive-parallel (Beowulf cluster, if you will) was probably running AIX, nevermind.
But it would be nice to see the "fallout" of such a huge bluescreen.
(-1, Bad pun.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I must say this ASCII stuff has come a long way since the days of the dial-up BBS.
: )
Don't read this!
...I wonder if they could answer a question for me. Will it really only be cockroaches and Keith Richards that would live through a nuclear war?
Whooo hooo! Way to go RS/6000! Just another notch in the blade of the RISC vs. CISC debate. (And no, I'm not trolling for either side!)
So when I head down to the lab and hunch over the network code for my rs6k machines I can think "these machines are the bomb!"
It'll make me feel better when I crash them with my device drivers.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
But does it play pong?
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..
This gives me bad flashbacks of "War Games" for some reason. I sure hope ASCI White sucks at tic tac toe.
Maybe we could talk them into running a Medal of Honor: Allied Assualt? They could bill is as a "stratigic nazi slaying simulation".
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
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..
E-Bomb already means an EMP bomb (See anything by Carlo Kopp). Try P-bomb (pseudo) or f-bomb (haha).
Obviously within a limited problem scope that the machine would be good at. I just wish they were a bit more explicit about this so that non-techies won't tell me how they're worried that machines will be watching them and manipulating them ala-HAL all of a sudden.
Then again why would a non-techie even browse to that page anyway? Never mind.
Who saw the headline and thought that they had finally invented giant EMP-bombs, a-la science fiction?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
There's supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.
I think the original subject for this post was a bit misleading. This was the first 3d simulation of a nuclear explosion. There have been many previous simulations of nuclear explosions, only they were limited to 2d plots of data. Nuclear explosion and fallout simulation has been the major purpose of supercomputing at Livermore and Los Alamos for decades.
Rouge nations? What, do you dress them up like whores?
I you're gonna be a dumbass, learn to spell. Rogue
The title of the Star Trek episode where warring
planets conducted battles completely thru computer
simulation. This advance takes us closer to that
future possibilty.
But, instead of modeling Nuclear detonations, I
think the interests of warfare could also be served by setting up an ASCI White as a massive
international UT server, and let national conflicts be settled by a nice game of capture
the flag.
Best two out of three?
If I may make a suggestion, I would like to see this beast of a super-computer used to assist the SETI@home project...
:-)
With this thing's horsepower I would expect to have conclusive findings of extra terrestial life within a matter of weeks and be shaking hands with E.T. by the end of summer...
Also, I must throw in the obligatory comment of "wouldn't you just love a beowulf cluster of these things...".
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
Consistency please HERE
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
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.
No there will be real testing because it will be necessary. As the parent post states-- a simulation is useful but cannot replace the real thing.
A simulation is no better than the model used to build it- and that model is built by people who expect things to work a certain way. If you want to know for sure what something will do - you have to try it out.
I would think that they must use some interesting logarithms to emulate randomness. But in the end these are once again- simulations that cannot do more than emulate the real thing.
It sounds like a lot of it is going to be used to simulate how aging weapons will behave. They already have real test data on how they worked when they were new.
When new weapons are developed they will need to be tested by actual detonation.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I read the headline as "ASCII white detonated the first E-bomb"
Wait... ASCII, dumb terminals, email bombs, endless buzzers...it's all coming back to me now.
Isn't this out of date? Next will be "Mainframe successfully runs up to ten users on terminals"
Oh, wait, nuclear bombs simulations. Ok. Never mind. Sorry.
I'll do the obligatory "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" joke, shall I?
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
Congress did not ratify the nuclear test ban treaty.
The only way i can explain this is that some people actually want other countries to develop nuclear capabilities. Which is not that far fetched actually.
It may stop the US from pulling out of another treaty but it only increases the chance that nuclear weapons will be used by and/or against them.
Nuclear proliferation will not improve your lives in any way. It has a good chance of making you paranoid and miserable, and a very small chance of killing you and everyone you care about.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Would it be less sad if it also played chess?
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.
Or perhaps to aid in the design of smaller, more precise weapons in order to limit civilian casualties if they do have to be used?
Now, how much processor time do they need to help the e-terminators to protect e-John Conner from the e-Robot Holocaust?
Or prevent e-David Banner from turning into the e-Hulk?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Greenpeace immediately responded by running simulations of anti-nuke protests on an old 486 sitting on a card table outside Lawrence Livermore Labs.
so what, it still takes 1 min to process a web request simultainiusly for every man, woman and child on earth...its not that great :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Nice to see that the masters of war have found a way to develop their implements of destruction without resorting to messy nuke tests that could harm children or other living things. Will they have stickers that say, "No animals were harmed in the development of this warhead?" I hope the folks at peta are happy about this.
Actually, that's not the only purpose. It's also capable of simulating nuclear material degradation, enabling better disposal and/or storage techniques for existing, no longer useful material.
Also, future, faster computers (such as the petaflops machine being planned by Sandia National Labs, Compaq and Applera) will be used for genetic engineering and other biology-related research. Naysayers will think "bio weapons", then again, I guess you can find evil intent everywhere if you just look hard enough.
Actually, not to make nuclear weapons sound nicer than they are, but the major (theoretical) use for nuclear weapons is against another country's nuclear missile arsenal, or against other hardened military or command targets. Blowing up cities to kill civilians serves no real purpose. What enemy that you have to use nuclear weapons against cares about their civilian population?
Improvements in ICBM targeting technology allow smaller and smaller yields to achieve the same damage to hardened targets. That reduces even more the need for very high-yield weapons, and reduces the fallout and civilian casualties that would be associated with a strike against military targets.
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.
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.
Well, fallout causes cancer doesn't it?
There's also the other side of the coin. Nuclear weapons are a reality, and we need to know their effectiveness from a defensive point of view as well. Maybe this can also be used to simulate what the effect would be if a terrorist gained access to a nuclear weapon of some type. No amount of wishing nuclear weapons would cease to exist will make it happen. By knowing as much as we can, maybe it's possible to more effectively defend against and deter their use.
Quite a few people have quoted the Teraflops/sec of Seti@home for comparision, perhaps suggesting that there is a better way of attacking these sorts of problems. I think if this sort of problem were amenable to a "widely distributed" computing attack we'd already all be running a covert client as part of our new windows XP installation (at least us windows users).
Simulating nuclear explosions however is the sort of problem that requires the generation of massive amounts of data and intensive communications between computing nodes. Not something that's going to work well over a dialup connection...
-josh
But nuclear weapons are only to be feared when they're in the hands of rogue nations. And the US is obviously not a rogue nation, because we respect international law.
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we respect other nations' sovereignty.
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we don't train people to destabilize other counties by terrorizing their citizens.
We do? Well, at least we respect human rights, the democratic process, and justice for all.
We don't? Oh. Um. Well ... we're not a rogue nation because we love freedom and wave flags and stuff! Yeah, that's it. So don't worry about us having weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it's not like we'd ever really use them.
Um. Not more than we already have. Well, we probably wouldn't. Unless we decided that we really really needed to.
(Score: -1, Treasonous)
Between the US and the old USSR there have been over 2000 detonations of nukes on the planet. I think we've had plenty of time and data from actual explosions to devise a theory, implement a simulation, and check it against the recorded data.
So, to answer your question, they got their data to test the simulation by blowing up nukes.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Well-said.
And even if (and it's a not-bloody-likely-"if") what we learn makes its way into the design of new weapons, it appears that we're moving towards an arsenal featuring "really small nukes to penetrate and take out deep hardened bunkers with negligible surface fallout", as opposed to the more traditional "lob a 20M airburst at a city and let the fallout land where it may".
(And for those who'll jump up and say "Aha, that's what they're trying to do! Design more weapons! All weapons bad!", I point out that the probability of this is extremely low -- a moment's thought will make it obvious that the type of physics required to model the behavior of an earth-penetrating weapon is pretty much completely unrelated to the physics involved in simulating what goes on at the heart of a nuke.)
Bottom line: This is just an extremely cool physics simulation, no doubt most of it highly classified, but as this level of computing power becomes cheaper and more prevalent, I can think of ways in which some of the physics being modeled could also be used in the design of nuclear rockets and other next-generation propulsion systems.
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.
You DO realize that you just explained a Star Trek: The Original Series episode, yes?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
(Score: -1, Treasonous)
Seditious. If you're going to get hanged, make sure it's for the correct crime!
0xB
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).
MP3 Search Engine
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.
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?
In a 2nd strike, EBCIDIC Detontates its First E-Bomb as a show of strength.
Then in a further show of strength, UNICODE detonates its first E-bomb.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
In any major war (ww3 style here, not desert storm etc). the civilian population very quickly becomes non civilian. All the men are soldiers. boys are potential soldiers, and the women man (bad pun!) the factories. Therefore they are semi-legitimate targets. If not morally, then certainly strategically.
The wristwatch you wear will contain many many times more computing power than this :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Only if you take them both as absolutes, and believe that countries can't sign onto any international law treaties without giving up all of their sovereignty.
Does agreeing to abide by state and federal law mean that individuals give up all their individual rights and freedoms? No, of course not.
Same thing.
When I was working in a Bacterial Genomics lab, I used to crave faster, more powerful computers to crunch through genomic data. This type of computing power is a dream for bioinformaticists who want to, for example, create targeted cures for bacterial disease based on specific genetic idioms.
What is unfortunate is that we have an expensive, tax-payer funded processor farm that is dedicated to the useless pursuit of studying weapons of mass destruction. A great text about the myths of US nuclear policy can be found in Michio Kaku's (with Dan Axelrod) To Win a Nuclear War. It's in the style of a book like "The Hacker Crackdown", well researched, and really interesting.
If you are interested in stopping Nuclear Weapons Research in the US, another great site is that of Nobel Peace Prize Winning group Intl. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). I think it's telling to compare IPPNW's site to the Defense Department's Moronic Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team web site!
If they've already built the thing, how can it be 3x faster than "the most powerful computer in existence today"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mod this person up! I agree, this type of computer research is sick! Why isn't this processor farm being used for, say, bacterial genomics?
I don't fear any counrty that developes it's own nuclear bomb - a cretain amount of civilisation is required in order to achieve such a feat.
Specifically, you need Nuclear Power and Rocketry, plus you need to build the Manhattan Project. Except the damn Mongols keep put SDI Defense everywhere.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
In other words, it will simply run through a set of possible behaviours that science currently expects of it. Not it's actual behaviour.
Doing this in the real world might throw up new information that hadn't prevoiusly been predicted. Doing it on a computer seems like an exercise in scientific back-slapping to me.
Cheers,
Ian
Laurence Livermore Labs just signed a contract with Brilliant Digital for the extra 18 TeraFlops.
A BD spokesman says "Why have the power of a 1000 desktops when you can have Millions (evil cackle)"
Kazaa users around the globe were saddened to learn that they do not have enough 'left over' CPU cycles to acually decode and listen to their MP3s.
"All your cycles are belonging to us!"
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
The point of war is to kill people till the other side decides it is in their best interest to capitulate.
Sadly, wars will always be a fact of human existence until people stop either evolve, or kill themselves off.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I'm not commenting about the politics of the situation, I am commenting on the reality of the situation. Esp. as it relates to simulations using computers.
I think it is unrealistic to believe that the U.S. will never again test nuclear weapons. There may not be a pressing need at this time, or they may have found a way to do so that evades detection.
Either way- I'm glad. I am not one who is prone to think that disarmament is a good way to go. There is a crack in another thread about Neville Chamberlain that I thought was right on. We live in a dangerous world and we need to maximize our ability to take effective action.
But frankly that whole thing is already getting beaten to death here.
I would love to know, in a way that I can understand (I am not a mathematician) how they go about modeling this type of event. How do they deal with unknowns? How do these simulations work?
That would be fascinating and applicable in many more areas than just nuclear testing.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
...developing and testing devices whose sole purpose is to /further/ destroy useful resources. This entire endeavor is an economic drain on the world, not only for its diversion of useful means, but for the ends to which they are (mis-)applied.
Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard are turning over in their graves...
Does this thing have ibm travelstar gxp75 drives?
I think my hard disk in my supercomputer crashed
have you run the drive fitness test?
Yes, it passed, but i'm fairly sure the smoking drive is bad
we need you to run the drive fitness test, are you in front of the computer?
I'm directly in front of it
Pull out the hard drive please
I'll brb, it's a few miles over
You said you were in front of it
I am in front of it
Does this supercomputer of yours have a serial number?
This is ASCI WHITE damn it.
I can't look up your warranty without a serial number
1. The serial number is 1.
I can't find that in our database, do you have a proof of purchase?
ACKKKKKKKKKKKKK
"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."
People are really like that. If you had a referendum on capital punishment and the choices were:
1) Yes, televised nationwide
2) Yes, not televised
2) No capital punishment
I can pretty much guarantee you that (1) would get the most votes. People are kind sick and twisted.
Let's have a look at this list, shall we?
Do you see India or Pakistan anywhere on the top 20? No? How about any other 'rogue nation?'
Never mind that they'd need a bunch of highly classified test data to run simulations with.
I think we can safely say neither India nor Pakistan will be simulating any nukes, for the time being.
I would think that they must use some interesting logarithms to emulate randomness.
Yeah, you're right... they would be REEEAAAAL interesting logarithms. Now for algorithms, I suspect they have a white noise generator. IBM probably built one in, since they know that one of the main uses for mainframes is massive Monte Carlo simulations.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
From the we-have-no-moral-context department
Does anyone else find this kind of "gee whiz" attitude towards weapons designed to kill the largest number of civilians possible somewhat distasteful? I know I do, particularly now that the US government is actively looking at ways to use nuclear-weapons on the battlefield, rather than as an absolute last resort.
I'm curious to know what kind of AIDS research you think could be done with a really fast computer? Most problems aren't suited to just throwing lots of computer power at them.
Furthermore, when equipment like this is built for military testing, the result almost always benifits other fields shortly afterward. After the DOE is done playing with it, time on the machine will be available for other research. You can rent CPU time on most of the ASCI machines the DOE has built in the past. Without the defense spending on nuclear simulation, this machine probably wouldn't have been funded in the first place.
Sorry, but there is very broad class of simulations where distributed computing across the internet is not going to help, called Finite Element Analysis. I don't know the specifics of nuclear explosion simulations, but the basic setup is similar to simulations of electromagnetic fields, mechanical stress and strain, heat transfer, the weather, etc. You divide the volume of interest up into lots of little cells (the "finite elements"). For a cell, you determine how conditions in a cell are influenced by influenced by neighboring cells, as well as the pre-existing condition of the cell. You code those equations into a program, and it cycles through all the cells to calculate the next state (one time tick later), then repeats until done.
) +T0(x,y,z-1)+T0(x,y,z+1))/6. You need special forms of this equation for cells at the edges. You write _for_ loops to cycle through all the cells and an outside _for_ loop to step through the time ticks -- or you might use a pre-written simulation program where you just have to plug in the cell geometry and the equations. Nuclear simulations must be considerably more complicated: it would require several variables tracking temperature, local concentrations of reacted and unreacted materials, radiation density, etc., and equations tracking how materials, flow in and out of the cells, among other things.
For instance, in a heat transfer simulation, the temperature of a cell changes from the initial temperature towards the average temperature of neighboring cells at a rate determined by the thermal conductivity of the material: T1(x,y,z) = (1-k)*T0(x,y,z) + k*(T0(x-1,y,z)+T0(x+1,y,z)+T0(x,y-1,z)+T0(x,y+1,z
But the point is, even at the most complicated, the calculations for one cell at one time tick are only going to take a few microseconds on a decent CPU. If you parallelize it by assigning one CPU to a cell, the CPU will do the calculations, then it will have to exchange data with all the other CPU's. The communications requirements can be met only by providing lots of direct dedicated CPU-CPU, or CPU-memory-CPU links. That is, it takes custom hardware. Try to do it through any kind of shared bus, and the comm bandwidth will severely limit the number of CPU's that can be actually used. Don't even think of trying to use the internet with latencies of seconds, and bandwidths of 56KHz to a few MHz.
This is bad news, not for DOE who have the money to build that custom hardware (and would have to keep their bomb secrets in-house anyhow), but for all the engineers and scientists who would love to have thousands of computers crunching their data for free, but their equations aren't suitable for it. For SETI@home, I think each computer gets a module consisting of one piece of recorded data and a batch of tests to be run against it; the modules do not have to communicate in between setup and completion, so little bandwidth is needed. It's great when it works, but we only know how to divide up big computing jobs completely like that for a few special cases.
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.
No, they just mixed english and metric...
DO YOU WANT TO BLOW UP MARS? yes
CALCULATING...
DARN IT, I MISSED
Author's note: that last line is in the Plucky Duck mode
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I just wanted to clarify something for people thinking 'But isn't ASCII White a bunch of machines?'
Yes, It is. But they are tightly intercoupled with an IBM SP Switch that has something like 300MB (Yes, Mega BYTE) second non-blocking throughput to handle the internode communication, both at the rack (16 machine) and cluster (In ASCII White's case, it's 128 racks I believe, 128 racks of 16 4-way Power3 SPs, I've been in the same room with it but didn't touch it/work on it/have anything to do with it except go 'whoa' when someone pointed it out to me) I'm probably wrong on the interconnect speed, I think it's much faster now. I'm a bit behind on IBM's SP stuff. Spend to much time watching Myrinet.
I'd like to take a gander at the parallel coding that was done to get this kind of simulation. This can't be a batch mode program (like distributed.net and seti) like you said. It'd be quite facinating, though I'm sure they'd shoot you after you read it for that Top Secret stuff.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Saddam Hussein has a bunker 75 feet under Bagdad.
We are seeking a way to use tactical nuclear weapons in the field.
Tactical nuke plans call for penetration into the ground so they can destroy bunkers.
Iraq is cutting oil production.
The Carlyle group uhh ... nevermind.
Former Pres. George Bush's career began in the oil industry.
Bush Sr. was President when we went to war with ... Iraq.
G. Dubya is President now and threatening Iraq ...
Saddam better duck.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
The first? Outlook and Outlook Express have been detonating them for years.
I wonder if mathew broderick was involved ?
Oh, come on. Except for some Russia vs. US and/or Europe conflict, no war involving nuclear weapons is going to be a long, drawn-out strategic contest involving lots of soldiers and factories. It would most likely be some small country striking to preserve itself under what it perceives to be overwhelming odds (Israel's Samson option), and if a large nuclear power is the aggressor, an obliteration of some hardened targets to allow a conventional force to overwhelm a smaller country (e.g., US against Iraq with a nuclear capability).
I don't see any realistic way that a society would regroup to "man the factories" to change the outcome of the fighting after a nuclear exchange. If a small country got hit, the fight is over--there's nothing to regroup. If a large country got hit, it might shrug it off. Only Russia/US have enough weapons to make a real dent in a large country's productive capacity.
Any country that depends on manpower reserves to win its wars is not going to hold up very well against a technologically sophisticated opponent. Iraq had a huge army mobilized, and a smaller coalition force was able to mop the floor with it. Civilians and factories did not come into play in any major way. Even if Iraq had been able to throw a few nukes into the US, killing US civilians would only have made the result worse for Iraq.
The kind of mobilization seen in WWII is not going to happen in future conflicts. Modern forces do not fight with mass-produced, overwhelming quantities of cheap weaponry. They use small quantities of specialized high-tech weaponry, which they have already, and then try very hard not to lose it.
This study was completed April 5, 2002. The previous articles have nothing about the results, just the information going into the study.
Click here or here.
ASCII building 451 Construction Scrapbook
Dammit, I want one of those, droool.
Future wars will be fought as simulations too, right?
We can only wish.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
God forbid the Cyber-Terrorists should get their hands on this! Good thing we have the far-reaching grasp of the Patriot Act and the new Cyberterrorism Act ready to defend us.
.
I think . .
Rob Carlson
I think you misspelt "Unless he cleans up his act, and pronto, Saddam better realize it doesn't matter whether he ducks or not"
...this gives a whole new dimension to DOS attacks
managers...why god invented purgatory
Simple. They just hired Mindcraft to do the benchmarking. :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
It's all relative.
Look at World War 2 - the fire bombing of various German cities was considered to result in acceptable civilian casualties.
Now look at the Gulf War and how many civilian casualties there were (probably the best comparative method would be to count successful military objectives eliminated - counting number of bombs dropped will result in wacky numbers, since carpet bombing involved hundreds or thousands of bombs for a single target, vs. 1 or 2 bombs with laser guidance).
And despite all of this, there were anti-war protestors complaining about every dollar spent in military R&D. It's hard to say that this couldn't turn out to be the same case.
And, regardless, this ignores that the primary purpose for the nuclear weapon testing usage of this computer isn't to design new weapons, it's to ensure that the current weapons are effective and are not dangerous in storage.
...plus, the engineering details, including how to make one small enough and robust enough that it can be hurled through the stratosphere in an ICBM and still detonate properly. That's why it's not only the materials, but the plans themselves, that are of interest to less-nuclear countries.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I thought the first and biggest E-Bomb was the Apple Newton.
Every dollar we invested in R&D cut down on the collateral damage in Iraq - and back then, smart bombs were expensive. Despite the fact that our aiming technology had improved somewhat, we still had to use a lot of "dumb bombs".
Ten years of further R&D expenditures have allowed us to cut down further on collateral damage in Afghanistan, and to do so cheaply - we now have smart-bomb accuracy at dumb-bomb prices.
I'm consistently amazed at the attitude of those who equate weapons R&D with "how to kill more people faster". News flash from 1960 - we've been able to do that for 40 years. Most, if not all, of our R&D since that time has been into making weapons that kill what they're aimed at, but nothing more.
Overkill makes for nice screen shots in video games, but it's pointless when you know you're gonna have to rebuild the civilian infrastructure when the shooting stops.
> And, regardless, this ignores that the primary purpose for the nuclear weapon testing usage of this computer isn't to design new weapons, it's to ensure that the current weapons are effective and are not dangerous in storage.
A point I didn't emphasize enough. Thanks again.
Well, if More's law holds up:
Nucular Detonation =1000 years of CPU (from article)
Assume CPU speed doubles every two years.(More's Law)
Log(1000)/ Log(2) =9.96578 (Base 2 Log of 1000)
9.96578 * 2=19.9316 (Every two years)
Therefore in 20 years you should be able to do nuclear detonations on your Playstation. Better start putting export restrctions on those Playstations again...
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
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.
The W87 Warhead in current is already optimal! The LEP is proof of that.
Surety and command and control systems are more important in 2002 than physics simulation of actual detonations. Really, read on...
Apart from adding LAX-112 (Los Alamos stable explosive) instead of 1980s PBX-9502 and LX-17 from Livermore. (LX-l7 Is most popular in this suitcase-containable bomb), few things other than antispoof sensor and newer anti-tamper hardware need to be added.
The real problem is installing newer technologies when retrofitting to make it harder for hackers and engineers to set one off without its failsafes.
Failsafes (surety) to prevent unauthorized detotation are the most complex part of bomb engineering... not silly simulations of micro-bombs on ASCII white clusters.
These failsafe technologies have many buzzwords but are commonly called Permissive Action Links (PALs), and surety.
Many 12 digit Category F combinations currently exist but have self shutdown if too many errant codes sent to a w87 warhead.
The weapons are very good at destroying themselves electonically and physically without spilling plutonium as well.
Other than PALs, the amazing W87 also uses the Enhanced Nuclear Detonation Safety system (ENDS) developed by Sandia National Laboratories.
ENDS has lots of tamper resistence and failsafe redundancy and isolation of circuits.
A valid AMAC can be created to arm a W87 if opening the case is too challenging to a team of highly motivated engineers.
Even with codes though setting off a W87 warehead requires that each sensor is defeated.
This would include gyros, magnetometers, accelerometers, vibration sensors, and pressure transducers. Trajectory is estimated too! To prevent obvious tampering many of these were made microminiature by Sandia in EFI. (Enhanced Fidelity
Instrumentation) to replace existing larger psuedo-JTAs (Joint Test Assemblies). Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) current "good stuff" derives from FTU-12 (flight test unit 12) from Sandias Telemetry group (8416) and Sandias Weapons Project Group, Ed Talbot (lead), Cheryl Lari, and John Liebenberg (all in 2266).
More modern anti tamper stuff includes on-board millimeterwave radar no doubt (but classified).
Such radar would be part of the Environmental Sensing Devices (ESDs) (which determine the correct environmental conditions detonation)
The W87 weapon needs to sense spinning along its axis and pressure drop and many special measurements to detonate... even if the codes are cracked or force-probed. Sandia's MDL center 1300 (Microelectronics Development Laboratory) is tasked the challenge of defeating hardware probing and electro induced hacking of surity.
The W87 lacks coherent Lightning Arrestor Connectors (LACs), but does not need them intramodule because of its design. Multiple attempts using high energy to set of a warhead would probably just zap the circuits of the RBP (Reentry Body Programmers) or the WP (Warhead Programmers)
So at this point the W87 ( mankinds greatest technological weapon achievement) is a safe very high yield, ultra compact, tamper proof nuke.
The NSA in 1998 made it more "secure" by merely making components of its arming overly "obscure". Security through obscurity is asinine no doubt, but nevertheless the methods outlined in DIST (Defense Integrated Support Tools database) are now "top secret" even though an open crypto safe protocol would have been sufficient. The GAO, op cit., 13 August 1997, p. 8 was the last public analysis of the DIST containing the arming parts along the command chain to a W87.
You cant simulate anti-hacking anti-ICE anti-emulator anti-virtualmachine anti-clockvariance and anti-forcelatching with a damned ASCII white propaganda simulation of a mini-detonation. You need IQ and paper and pen.
Living near water makes a lot of sense for easy living. And, being away from it does not save you from weather: hail, tornados, earthquakes, mudslides, etc. Since 2/3 of the Earth's surface is H20, we need to figure that a decent percent of people will be affected by it.
Click here or here.
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!
Some problems are easy to parallelize, like SETI - each user gets handed the radio blips from a given chunk of the sky and crunches numbers to see if there's an alien there, and then every couple of hours sends in a "No, nobody there either" message and gets another chunk of sky to look in. Other problems are harder to parallelize, like turbulent airflow over non-smooth surfaces - each processor crunches a bit about the uncoming chunks of air over its chunk of surface, figures out where they're going and how twisty they are and hands them to the next processor, which has just done the same thing and changed all the inputs on that side, and going three-dimensional makes it worse, but if each processor is only interacting with its neighbors, that's still easier than if any change in the system changes everything else in the system. Also, memory bandwidth capabilities differ substantially between Big Iron machines vs. Lots Of PCs, and some problems really need that.
ASCI White is somewhere in between the Beowulf kind of network and the Super-Mega-Cray kind of machine, with tightly-coupled clusters of processors tied together by still-pretty-fast interconnects.
As somebody else pointed out, the military couldn't really use home machines for their computing, because the information about the design and engineering of nuclear explosives would leak out, and there are some things that are better off No Source At All than Open Source... But there are many problems that could use similar technology, either rooms full of small machines, or for some less security-critical applications, they might be able to use lots of PCs on bureaucrats' desks (except that if they still do procurement the way they used to, there are a lot of machines that have probably been upgraded to Pentium66s or Pentium133s from their predecessor Z248 286s, but are otherwise Not Blazingly Fast because if they're good enough to run a browser and a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, they're really just fine for 95% of the users.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When you get bored trying to help us find alien life with SETI@home, why don't you help us get rid of the life already here, with nuclearannihilation@home.
On the other hand, sometimes they're just trying to schedule a parade or a general's golf game :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No, the intent of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty was to force nations that could not afford systems such as this to cease nuclear weapons research, guaranteeing the US's continued superiority. So yes, it is hypocritical. But that was the intent.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Bunker busters are also lower yield than city busters, but that's because there are times you want to make a 100-ton or 1 kiloton hole in the ground without having to haul in a kiloton of high explosive or making a 20kiloton Hiroshima-sized hole in the ground and wiping out the city. Similarly, "Tactical nuke" is defined as "Designed for use in Germany" -- some of the nuclear cannon shells are designed for taking out Russian tank forces without wasting the country.
But yes, both of these are relatively scary, in that they lower the threshold for nuclear use to some thinkable, as opposed to Mutually Assured Destruction. This did deter the Russians, but it also made it easier for the US to step on Russian satellites so it wasn't decreasing the chance of war, just changing the terms and the probable battlegrounds.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Will there be a doom III port on it? :)
33 teraflops... you could calculate true radiosity/raytracing/caustics/shadows/photon maps/etc in realtime with that bitch (without using some fake lightmap effects and such).
You know what's weird? We're all impressed by this machine, but seeing how things evolve, that thing will probably be the "new and improved edition" of my kid's "GameBoy RealLife (TM)" in a not too distant future... unbeleivable. I just hope Carmack will "live long and prosper" to get to this, and me to enjoy it.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
So other than nuke labs, governments, universities, government weather bureaus, and computer companies that make really big computers, most of the really big computers are run by financial institutions. There's the occasional petroleum company, Pharma, or car company, and some universities that are smaller and might be doing non-government research, but there basically isn't a lot of general industry until you get down to about #150 around 200 GFlops (in particular, there are a bunch of 128-processor HP machines from 150-180.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Preach on, brother. I realized I had poor cooling in my PC when the Athlon 1.33 GHz CPU fried itself one week ago. It actually smells like a microwaved CD when you turn it on now...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I would be interested to know how long this machine takes to find primes etc.
A neat trick for old CPU's, chips, bugs, and other insects for detonation purposes, is a stout motor capacitor from an air conditioner and a high voltage DC power supply found from a discarded laserjet. I have seen 480uF capacitors rated at 480 volts actually hold 8KV generated from the drum power supply. Now wire up a dozen of these capacitors to charge two parallel plates.
Arm the bomb. This will take a few minutes. Defective capacitors will report with a large bulge on the side and may jump off the table. Safety glasses, leather gloves and jacket are recommended. Hearing protection is manditory. If everything goes well, a large concentration of potential energy will rest between those two deadly plates.
Now drop the old electronic part or pesky insect between the plates. Observe the complete destruction. Some flying parts from silicon chips may damage surrounding areas. Insects will be completely vaporized and harmless.
Xray radiation during detonation should be minimal unless voltage is increased somewhere around 30KV. Be careful!
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.
plus, the engineering details, including how to make one small enough and robust enough that it can be hurled through the stratosphere in an ICBM and still detonate properly.
Probably the reason that the only two bombs used in anger were tossed out of planes on paracutes.
There are other ways of delivering weapons.
Lessee...we can simulate the intricate details of a nuclear explosion but not the heaving, naked body of Natalie Portman???
Helloooo! Priorities people!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?