Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Fusion Simulator Among Software Picked For US's Summit Supercomputer
An anonymous reader writes Today, The Register has learned of 13 science projects approved by boffins at the US Department of Energy to run on the 300-petaFLOPS Summit. These software packages, selected for the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program, will be ported to the massive parallel machine, and are hoped to make full use of the supercomputer's architecture.They range from astrophysics, biophysics, chemistry, and climate modeling to combustion engineering, materials science, nuclear physics, plasma physics and seismology.
Actaully they built that in the late 70's, its was called Detroit.
Oh, wait, MS bought Minecraft, no wonder they didn't include it.
Be seeing you...
You surf the internet without adblock, ghostery, and/or hosts files? Are you retarded or just a masochist?
Still only 2 GB memory per core. We've been stuck there for more than a decade. Useless piece of iron ...
Sure, because a cheap, clean source of energy wouldn't help with any of those things.
Let's try to solve global warming and poverty and economic inequality first.
Cost effective fusion reactors could be a solution to all of these.
WTF is a boffin?
No one really knows but many of them died to bring us this information.
For a long time the reason why schools of boffin sometimes beached themselves in places like the Thames estuary was unknown, but we now think the cause is a vain search for funding.
A sufficiently detailed human physiology mode could mean a big drop in the time and expense of searching for and qualifying new medications.
"Simulations of fusion are only 50 years away!"
Fusion is just a pipe dream, like ftl travel. A better solution would be to kill all rich people and Americans.
Yeah just like the heavier than air flight pipe dream and all the shit load of other pipe dreams that have become a reality. So if you're done being no help, kindly fuck off.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
When it could be analyzed, reduced to a few equations and done on a pocket calculator?
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you have no idea what you're talking about.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Now we can get useless results twice as fast!
For those of you unfamiliar with the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LASNEX
A WWII radar operator. I'm serious. Google Books it.
Computational drug design is already a big topic in supercomputing, although it's much more focused on interactions of individual molecules. That's currently so complex that it's more efficient to build specialized machines (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... ).
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
> Cost effective fusion reactors
Oxymoron.
We *might* build a working fusion reactor someday.
However, we already know it will not be cost effective. Everyone knows this. The head of the French nuclear research group and the director of the Max Planck Institute co-wrote a paper explaining why. So did the former director of the US fusion program. So have lots of other people.
The problem is very simple. A wind turbine consists of a generator, a turbine, and a metal pole. A coal plant consists of a generator, steam turbine, cooling, piping, coal boiler, scrubbers and a very large building. Thus, after initial development during the 1990s and 2000s, wind turbines have become much cheaper than coal plants. As a result, coal plant construction has fallen. You may point to China, but China is installing more wind than coal, as is everyone else on the planet.
And this will be true forever. The inherent comparative complexity of the two systems means that wind will always be cheaper. In fact, even if you skip the boiler, the rest of the plant is still more expensive. Make sure you understand that; a complete wind turbine is less expensive than half of a coal plant.
A fusion plant consists of all of the same parts as a coal plant, except we replace the boiler with a FANTASTICALLY EXPENSIVE fusion reactor, lithium cooling system, tritium extractor, superconducting magnets, etc etc. This part will always, always, be fantastically more expensive than a coal fired boiler. So it will never, ever, be cheaper than wind turbines. Ever. Not even remotely close.
At this point you'll want to say something like "you can't predict the future" or similar twaddle, in spite of science having been invented to do just that. But there's a more powerful counterargument: as it stands, wind is cheaper than a coal plant without a burner. So even if you can build the fusion reactor for zero dollars, no one will build one. So now you start thinking of ways to lower the cost of the rest of the system, inserting unobtanium or some science fiction energy extraction system. The problem is you've just made coal and fission cheaper too.
Why can't we do the equivalent of SETI@Home or the protein folding thing or hell, even bitcoin mining for fusion simulation?
I'm amazed you wrote this entire long post and didn't mention once the amount of power that gets generated by each type of plant or long term maintenance costs. I believe that your premise *could* be true, but you're statement is no better than saying that dirts bikes are better than UPS trucks for delivering packages because they cost significantly less.
I mean, come on, if there was a fusion reactor being developed, it would be at the UW and ...
oh
Hmm.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --