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Los Alamos Fire Idles NSA Supercomputer

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the disko-inferno dept.

ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press." Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.

12 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. typo by shentino · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's Agency, not Administration

    1. Re:typo by vbraga · · Score: 2

      I think the headline might be referring to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and not to the NSA.

      --
      English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
    2. Re:typo by shentino · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yup.

      I just checked on Cielo, and apparently it is the NNSA that operates it, and not the NSA.

      So they're wrong on two levels, one for misspelling NSA, and two for using the wrong agency.

    3. Re:typo by ygslash · · Score: 2

      It's Agency, not Administration

      Thanks.

      But actually, it's Administration: The National Nuclear Security Administration. It turns out that the author of this AP story was a little confused.

  2. maybe its just me by papasui · · Score: 3, Funny

    but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.

    1. Re:maybe its just me by jhoegl · · Score: 2

      Yeah, it is a terrible headline.
      I thought someone got fired until I remembered that Los Alamos is surrounded by fire.
      Then, IDLE != shut down.
      Be less terrible at your shock and Awe titles Slashdot.

    2. Re:maybe its just me by ygslash · · Score: 2

      maybe its just me, but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.

      Yeah, sorry about that. Slashdot now has a very tight limit on the number of characters in a title, so it's tough to get in the point of the post. You've really got to pack it in.

      We need to come up with a good compressed format for Slashdot titles.

  3. lp0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    > WARNING: Job halted - lp0 on fire

  4. Wrong agency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore all belong to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), _NOT_ the National Security Agency (NSA).

  5. Link soup by lancelet · · Score: 2

    OK - this is one of those postings where I ask: which of the links is actually TFA?!

  6. Re:Effect on TOR by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    I'd be fairly surprised, even if the NNSA has any interest in Tor, to see much effect...

    Tor involves enough crypto-twiddling that it isn't quite as computationally trivial as static-content webserving; but on anything remotely resembling modern hardware it is still going to be bandwidth constrained, rather than limited by anything else.

    A huge supercomputer at a site likely using IPs from a well-known and early allocated government block would be a lousy place to put it. What a hypothetical interested party would want is a whole bunch of cheap and annonymous 1Us colo-ed in various random places and/or cheapy VPS instances all being paid for by front companies with PO boxes and horribly forgettable names.

  7. Ya I was wondering what was up by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2

    There's no way the NSA lets their stuff go out to any other supercomputer, even one owned by the DoE. The NSA's institutional paranoia is legendary. Makes sense when you think about it, their mission is to safeguard critical US communications (government, financial and so on hence their participation in AES) and to do electronic intelligence gathering. Give that, one can understand how they get rather paranoid about informational security.

    These big supercomputer are DoE (that is the NNSA's parent agency). They do all kinds of things, including weather simulation but a part of it as you might guess form the agency is nuclear testing. The US can't actually test its nuclear weapons anymore as it is a signatory to a treaty banning nuclear tests. So instead it does them by computer. These high end supercomputers really can simulate them down to an atomic level, so they can test and see how the nuclear weapons stockpile is holding up.