NNSA Supercomputer Breaks Computing Record

Lecutis writes "National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton F. Brooks announced that on March 23, 2005, a supercomputer developed through the Advanced Simulation and Computing program for NNSAs Stockpile Stewardship efforts has performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOP/s) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world."

Comments

More Computer Power=Fewer Nuclear Explosions

[Nova Express]

To study the effects of different nuclear weapon designs, there are basically two approaches:

1. Throw massive amounts of computing power at the problem (as done here), or:
2. Actually set off a nuclear weapon.

Having massive computing power in the hands of Lawrence Livermore scientists reduces or even eliminates the need for U.S. nuclear forces to actually detonate nuclear and thermonuclear explosions.

Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.

Re:and its only half the machine too!

[RicktheBrick]

It would seem to me that with the great accuracy and concrete penetrating weapons that we possess that we could establish a future date when the United States would destroy all of our nuclear weapons. I believe that we could do this unilateraly. I believe we could wipe out all the leadership of any country that dared to launch an attack on our country and hopefully we will be able to intecept their missile before they reach our cities. I do not believe that we can morally tell anyone not to possess nuclear weapons unless we dedicate ourself to a date when we do not possess them too.

Can we qualify this a bit?

[Moderation abuser]

"making it the fastest supercomputer in the world"

Or rather the fastest supercomputer with published LINPACK results. There are a number of reasons that agencies with supercomputers might not want to publish results.