Ultrafast Supercomputer to Simulate Nuke Explosion

[Khephra]

LIVERMORE, Calif. (Reuters) - Leading nuclear scientists with top security clearances will gather next summer at a screening room east of San Francisco and witness the results of the greatest effort ever in supercomputing.

Using a computer doing 360 trillion calculations a second, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab will simulate the explosion of an aging nuclear bomb in three dimensions. The short, highly detailed video produced by the world's fastest computer will attempt to illustrate how missiles dating back to the Nixon administration would perform today.

"My job ... is to ensure that the nuclear weapons in the stockpile are safe and reliable," said Bruce Goodwin, associate director for defense and nuclear technologies. "Safe means no matter what you do to them they don't go off when they are not supposed to. Reliable means that should the president ever have to use one, it will work exactly as it is supposed to."

The United States has about 10,000 nuclear warheads as a deterrent against attack. Washington stopped real nuclear tests in 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996.

http://olympics.reuters.com/audi/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=7179546

[fshrink]

1. "Ultrafast Computer to Simulate Presidential Election."

But not the popular explosion which will, sooner or later, follow.

[IHeart1993]

10. Sim-Elections

Wait, we already had those.

[HeeBGBz]

2. Do. You. Want. To. Play. A. Game?

eom

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

4. A. Strange. Game.

The. Only. Winning. Move. Is. Not. To. Play.

[derrald]

7. That kid had a hell of a sound card

for 1982

[SKKY]

20. All your base are belong to us...

[lovuian]

3. Where the Best place to hang out!!!

thats what they are looking for!!!

[SariesNightly]

5. Since Hiroshima..

and Nagasaki are STILL classified as "tests", I fail to see the need for an artificial sim when the biggest scale real life testing they could ever carry out has been done nearly 50 years ago.

[EmpireWeAre]

6. Words fastest computers have always been used

for nuke design, testing and simulation. They like to use the ruse that since the test ban treaty they need to run simulations to ensure the viability of the American nuke arsenal.

This 2000 article is a good primer for the Reuters piece.
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2000_09/doesept00.asp

[VegasWolf]

8. The earliest simulations used the Fortran programming language

and was nortoriously inept with floating point operations,
especially matrix operations. Good thing the gov didn't
use that data as a justification for attacking Russia.

[TahitiNut]

11. You think Autocoder was better?

(sheesh!) :eyes:

[oly]

18. Control Data and Cray super computers (humungus mainframes)

were still used in the 80's and were common at the "labs". Folks loved them and hated the IBM "business" machines for the most part. They matched IBM in reliability. Cheap, pretty much "off the shelf" arrays of microprocessors killed them all off rather quicky.

[VegasWolf]

21. I know, I worked on them and on massively parallel array computers. n/t

[Deja Q]

9. A 'safe weapon', pardon me while I giggle my nuts off.

:eyes:

[TheWraith]

15. Put it this way

A safe nuke is one that doesn't go off.

[theophilus]

12. And the answer is........42. n/t

[Swamp Rat]

13. I guess they want to figure out how many bunker busters they can make

"Fahrenheit 200,000,000 Million Degrees: Hosted by Buster, the Friendly Nuke."

"Bring your sunscreen. Hoo hoo hoo!"

http://www.markfiore.com/animation/nukes.html

:nuke:

[IndianaGreen]

14. How about radical reduction in our nuke stockpiles?

We have enough nukes to wipe out the human race a thousand times over. Instead, let us challenge the belief that Man has the right to destroy G_d's Creation in order to protect capitalism, or any other ism.

[TheWraith]

16. It would take more than 10 nukes to wipe out humankind. NT.

[IndianaGreen]

17. It doesn't take many nukes to trigger a nuclear winter

Those that are vaporized by nuclear explosions will be the lucky ones. The ones that are not exposed to radiation, will surely die of cold and starvation.

The Nuclear Winter
Carl Sagan

But what if nuclear wars can be contained, and much less than 5000 megatons is detonated? Perhaps the greatest surprise in our work was that even small nuclear wars can have devastating climatic effects. We considered a war in which a mere 100 megatons were exploded, less than one percent of the world arsenals, and only in low-yield airbursts over cities. This scenario, we found, would ignite thousands of fires, and the smoke from these fires alone would be enough to generate an epoch of cold and dark almost as severe as in the 5000 megaton case. The threshold for what Richard Turco has called The Nuclear Winter is very low.

Could we have overlooked some important effect? The carrying of dust and soot from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere (as well as more local atmospheric circulation) will certainly thin the clouds out over the Northern Hemisphere. But, in many cases, this thinning would be insufficient to render the climatic consequences tolerable -- and every time it got better in the Northern Hemisphere, it would get worse in the Southern.

Our results have been carefully scrutinized by more than 100 scientists in the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union. There are still arguments on points of detail. But the overall conclusion seems to be agreed upon: There are severe and previously unanticipated global consequences of nuclear war-subfreezing temperatures in a twilit radioactive gloom lasting for months or longer.

Scientists initially underestimated the effects of fallout, were amazed that nuclear explosions in space disabled distant satellites, had no idea that the fireballs from high-yield thermonuclear explosions could deplete the ozone layer and missed altogether the possible climatic effects of nuclear dust and smoke. What else have we overlooked?

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan_nuclear_winter.html

[NIGHT TRIPPER]

19. Now God's given the "go ahead"-Christmas Tsunami-Chimp Football

Chumpo is a certified fuckup-
From Coke dealing to Awol to Drunk driving to election rigging-
He learns the hard way-
Only this time he's taking all of US awith him.
The Christian Right Wing nutjobs view the Christmas tsunami as a sign from Jesus to "take out" the non believers and give God a "helping hand". (you know for the greater good of the planet)
The U.S moranic leader will do the will of his religious supporters and will happily do God a favor by snapping the ball--the nuclear one.
The hard way
.
No simulation needed.:nuke:

[VegasWolf]

22. Switching and Finite Automata Theory says America go bang!