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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."
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.
Makes you wonder what the government has that its /not/ telling us about... heh
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"If I can see farther it is because I am surrounded by dwarves." -- Murray Gell-Mann
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.
Greenpeace immediately responded by running simulations of anti-nuke protests on an old 486 sitting on a card table outside Lawrence Livermore Labs.
It is not cancer, but there is much noted on ASCI White being used for Weather prediction, which does save countless lives yearly.
Click here or here.
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.
- analyze the human genome,
- fold cancer-curing proteins,
- locate possible sources of alien intelligence, or
- 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.)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.
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.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
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.
Welcome to Iraq. Please download your copy of sadam@home...
--locust
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.
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