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Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire
sushi writes "NZ's Stuff news site is reporting: 'Peter Jackson's special effects shop Weta Digital has teamed ... to establish a world-class supercomputing facility in Wellington which will be rented out to clients worldwide.' Currently comprising 504 IBM blade servers, each of which contains two 2.8 Gigahertz Intel Xeon processors, 6 Gigabytes of memory and 40 Gigabytes of storage, and ranked 80th in the top 500 supercomputers, they are intending to upgrade into the top 10. Also covered at the Australian Financial Review."
How soon before the bad guys set up a dummy corporation and start running nuclear bomb or protein folding simulations on this cluster?
The hardest part by far in making a nuclear weapon is getting the fissile material. If you are able to get highly enriched uranium you don't even need to do any simulations, the design is fairly simple and no testing is needed. Plutonium is a bit harder.
The point though is that computer simulations of nuclear weapons is the least of your problems, and is by no means required. Computers aren't secrets, and getting a few hundred of them together in a cluster is a task anyone with $100,000 can easily accomplish. Compared to getting the required fissile material, any required computations are easy.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with protein folding. Is their some doomsday weapon you can create by knowing how proteins fold? Even if it is, it's not a big concern. No one has gotten even close to completely simulating a protein folding. There's simply not enough computing power yet. What's been done to date are just small scale simulations.
AccountKiller
It really cracks me up that you rate finding large mersenne primes in the same category as curing disease or discovering other intelligent life forms. Talk about something with no practical applications...