Roadrunner breaks computer speed barrier
IBM and scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have built the world's fastest supercomputer and will use it to simulate nuclear detonations as a way of assessing the U.S. nuclear stockpile without actually exploding warheads.
The supercomputer called Roadrunner has broken a speed barrier - a petaflop of sustained performance - that eluded computer makers for several years. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second.
Working at that speed, the computer can perform the complex simulations the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) needs to be confident that aging U.S. nuclear warheads still work properly, said Thomas D'Agostino, NNSA administrator.
The computer, which IBM says will fill 21 tractor trailers, will be shipped to Los Alamos in New Mexico in July. It was built and is being tested in an IBM plant in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Once it's installed at Los Alamos, it will be used to analyze the performance of nuclear weapons and for other classified military work, including simulations that will support U.S. troops in Iraq, D'Agostino said.
The computer will perform very complex simulations to study warhead performance from multiple perspectives in space and time, said Michael Anastasio, director, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
To be confident that U.S. nuclear weapons still work as expected 30 to 40 years after they were built, the NNSA wants to run three-dimensional simulations of the primary chemical explosion that squeezes the plutonium core tightly enough to set off the nuclear explosion, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
Among other things, the computer must accurately calculate the propagation of the pressure front of the chemical explosion, Kristensen said. Pressure from that explosion must be absolutely uniform on the nuclear core so that the core explodes with the desired yield.
The Roadrunner's speed means "we can solve problems faster," D'Agostino said. Problems that used to take six months to solve now might be solved in a month, he said.
IBM says Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene, the previous speed record holder, and six times faster than the next fastest supercomputers.
In addition to monitoring nuclear weapons, Roadrunner computers are expected to have numerous commercial uses, Turek said.
The computer's modeling capability should enable it to help design more efficient engines, better ship hulls and superior aircraft, he said.
The financial services industry may use Roadrunner supercomputers to better predict market activity, and pharmaceutical companies can use it to simulate how drugs will react in the body, IBM says.
Source: www.defensenews.com.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments