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."

Comments

Might as well bet this out of the way:

[blankmange]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....

Someone...

[Anonymous Coward]

set up us the bomb!

it may take 1000 years to simulate on a home comp.

[prizzznecious]

But who needs a simulation? If you have an Athlon, just jiggle the fan off and watch the thing in real life!

Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Great Advances

[stevenbee]

I must say this ASCII stuff has come a long way since the days of the dial-up BBS.

: )

It's a good start, but...

[fobbman]

...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?

Re:It's a good start, but...

[Tumbleweed]

Some of the simulation results indicate that, in addition to cockroaches and Keith Richards, the following items will survive thermonuclear war:

1) an incredible number of AOL CDs. The exact number is to be determined via further testing of ASCI White, once it's reached further performance milestones.

2) Lawyers and Insurance salespeople. (see also: cockroaches)

Next up: Damnation Alley scenarios, yeehaw!

SETI@home

[Partisan01]

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......

Re:SETI@home

[0xB]

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.

Re:SETI@home

[spullara]

It's pretty easy to find out what the computing power of Seti@Home is, just check the totals to find that in the last 24 hours, on average, the computer was running at 96.79 teraflops. Only 8x that of ASCI White.

Re:SETI@home

[mblase]

I wonder what the computing power of SETI@home is. Could such a thing be done with a distributed system across home machines? Hmm. Should I download a distributed computing client to...

1. analyze the human genome,
2. fold cancer-curing proteins,
3. locate possible sources of alien intelligence, or
4. 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.)

Re:SETI@home

[bm_luethke]

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.

Re:SETI@home

[astroboy]

SETI@home can't be used for things like this, as it turns out.

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.

Re:SETI@home

[locust]

4. help the government explode a virtual nuke?

Welcome to Iraq. Please download your copy of sadam@home...

--locust

so when they said the system was "da bomb"

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

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..

Re:so when they said the system was "da bomb"

[pizen]

Just wondering....how would this help with cancer research projects?

They auction off server time to people who want to have the ultimate round of Counter-Strike and then donate the money to cancer research.

Re:so when they said the system was "da bomb"

[totallygeek]

30teraflops is impressive... we need to put this to work on the cancer research projects as well

It is not cancer, but there is much noted on ASCI White being used for Weather prediction, which does save countless lives yearly.

I love marketing text

[sahala]

...and capable of solving in one second what a human being with a calculator would need 10 million years to figure out.

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.

Am I the only one...

[Rayonic]

Who saw the headline and thought that they had finally invented giant EMP-bombs, a-la science fiction?

First 3D simulation...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A Taste of Armageddon...

[cqnn]

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?

This article was posted not long ago...

[SevenTowers]

Consistency please HERE

Re:sad

[swingkid]

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.

Anyone else read that wrong?

[pangur]

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.

and yet

[Edmund Blackadder]

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.

No its not...

[tgd]

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.

Re:No its not...

[Detritus]

Actually I do believe that a nuclear device cannot detonate "accidentally."

That is not true. Early nuclear weapons designs had severe safety problems by modern standards. It took many years of engineering and testing to solve the problems. A Hiroshima type bomb can be made to go critical by immersing it in water. A Nagasaki type bomb can explode with a measurable nuclear yield if the high-explosive lens assembly is detonated by fire or shockwave.

In other news...

[realgone]

Greenpeace immediately responded by running simulations of anti-nuke protests on an old 486 sitting on a card table outside Lawrence Livermore Labs.

12 teraflops

[the_2nd_coming]

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 :-)

Rods to the hogshead...

[seanadams.com]

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. :)

It all depends on the screen saver

[swb]

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.

The spirit of the law

[lobsterGun]

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?

Re:The spirit of the law

[Christopher Thomas]

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?

Unfortunately, there is no way to stop people from being able to perform computing simulations like this without also severely limiting most of their other technology - which would be grossly unethical. This is the same kind of problem as the old "limit the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons" thread that was going around a few years back; to make it impossible for anyone to figure out how to make nuclear weapons, you have to basically condemn them to an early-20th-century knowledge of science forever.

It's more practical (and more convenient from an ethical standpoint too) just to look for signs of nuclear weapon production. It takes quite a bit of industry to refine the required materials; this can be detected if the watchers are vigilant. You can also detect the required nuclear plants from orbit with the right kind of sensors and a bit of patience (and it would surprise me greatly if the US didn't already have a host of satellites quietly looking for gamma ray glow on the ground).

Limiting the ability to *design* nuclear weapons also doesn't really limit a nation's ability to *get* nuclear weapons, so I'd argue that the purpose of the test ban treaty is more to prevent escalation between the existing nuclear powers than to prevent new people from gaining nuclear capability.

Re:The spirit of the law

[Tackhead]

> 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.

and in 25 years time..

[ZaneMcAuley]

The wristwatch you wear will contain many many times more computing power than this :D

Re:OT: International Law vs. Sovereignty? (was Re:

[Bearpaw]

Has anyone ever noticed that national sovereignty and international law are mutually exclusive?

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.

A Misuse of Compute!

[mr_don't]

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!

civilization?

[s20451]

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.

Re:And this benefits mankind how?

[OS24Ever]

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 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.

I looked this up...

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:sad

[a_p_irwin]

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....

Re:it may take 1000 years to simulate on a home co

[technizmo]

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.

Neutron Bombs aren't good bunker busters

[billstewart]

Neutron bombs are designed to output a large blast of radiation so you can kill people quickly without turning the target into a glowing uninhabitable wasteland or creating major fallout. Specifically, they're designed for applications like nuking Russian soldiers and tanks in Germany and Poland without having to destroy Europe in order to save it.

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.