The U.S. National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) last Thursday officially dedicated two state-of-the-art supercomputers to help ensure the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal "remains safe and reliable without nuclear [physical] testing" — saying that one of them is now the fastest computer ever built.
According to the NNSA, a new IBM BlueGene/L and an IBM Purple system have been successfully installed and tested at the recently completed Terascale Simulation Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, Calif. U.S. nuclear scientists will use the two super-machines to run three-dimensional programs at dizzying speeds to achieve much of the nuclear weapons analysis that was formerly accomplished by underground nuclear experiments, capping a long campaign to use virtual testing in place of physical weapons detonations.
"The unprecedented computing power of these two supercomputers is more critical than ever to meet the time-urgent issues related to maintaining our nation's aging nuclear stockpile without testing," said NNSA Administrator Linton F. Brooks. "Purple represents the culmination of a successful decade-long effort to create a powerful new class of supercomputers. BlueGene/L points the way to the future and the computing power we will need to improve our ability to predict the behavior of the stockpile as it continues to age. These extraordinary efforts were made possible by a partnership with American industry that has reestablished American computing preeminence."
Brooks announced that the BlueGene/L performed a record 280.6 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) on the industry standard Linpack benchmark test suite. The Linpack test is used to determine the performance of the world's fastest computers, which are ranked in a routinely updated Top 500 list. The previous record holder was also the BlueGene/L system at LLNL, in a test setting, which sped through data at 136.8 TFlops. The completed system doubled its performance mark by doubling the number of its computing nodes to 65 536.
It has only been nine years since the major nuclear powers promised to end the practice of physical testing under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In that time, we have discovered that virtual testing technology can, indeed, make the real world a safer place to live in — and even point the way to an alternative to our constant state of threatened survival on this small planet.
SURVIVAL OF THE FASTEST
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) last Thursday officially dedicated two state-of-the-art supercomputers to help ensure the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal "remains safe and reliable without nuclear [physical] testing" — saying that one of them is now the fastest computer ever built.
According to the NNSA, a new IBM BlueGene/L and an IBM Purple system have been successfully installed and tested at the recently completed Terascale Simulation Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, Calif. U.S. nuclear scientists will use the two super-machines to run three-dimensional programs at dizzying speeds to achieve much of the nuclear weapons analysis that was formerly accomplished by underground nuclear experiments, capping a long campaign to use virtual testing in place of physical weapons detonations.
"The unprecedented computing power of these two supercomputers is more critical than ever to meet the time-urgent issues related to maintaining our nation's aging nuclear stockpile without testing," said NNSA Administrator Linton F. Brooks. "Purple represents the culmination of a successful decade-long effort to create a powerful new class of supercomputers. BlueGene/L points the way to the future and the computing power we will need to improve our ability to predict the behavior of the stockpile as it continues to age. These extraordinary efforts were made possible by a partnership with American industry that has reestablished American computing preeminence."
Brooks announced that the BlueGene/L performed a record 280.6 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) on the industry standard Linpack benchmark test suite. The Linpack test is used to determine the performance of the world's fastest computers, which are ranked in a routinely updated Top 500 list. The previous record holder was also the BlueGene/L system at LLNL, in a test setting, which sped through data at 136.8 TFlops. The completed system doubled its performance mark by doubling the number of its computing nodes to 65 536.
It has only been nine years since the major nuclear powers promised to end the practice of physical testing under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In that time, we have discovered that virtual testing technology can, indeed, make the real world a safer place to live in — and even point the way to an alternative to our constant state of threatened survival on this small planet.