Monday,
August 20, 2001 |
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Article |
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Fastest computer
A
US government laboratory unveiled the most powerful computer in the
world last week, programmed to simulate the explosion of a nuclear
bomb.
ASCI White, a $-110
million computer squeezed into enough refrigerator-sized units to fill
a couple of basketball courts, was officially unveiled by scientists
aiming to simulate nuclear tests the government has promised not to
carry out for real.
The beast, built by
International Business Machines Corp. from off-the-shelf processors
with a souped-up version of its commercial operating system, AIX,
weighs as much as 17 full-size elephants, takes as much cooling as 765
homes, and can do in a second what a calculator would take 10 million
years, IBM says.
Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, a government-funded laboratory that is home to
the machine, aims to find out a bit quicker than that how an atomic
bomb blows up so that it does not have to test any more.
"We are in a
race against time as we have to pass the baton to a new generation of
nuclear engineers who have neither designed nor tested a nuclear
weapon," David Schwoegler, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore
said.
The last US
underground test was about 10 years ago.
Like gunfighters
after the taming of the West, US nuclear scientists who have designed
and exploded nuclear weapons are a dying breed. Computers are being
brought in to fill the gap.
The 10-year
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, ASCI, is about halfway
done.
It aims to produce a
computer that can simulate a nuclear explosion by 2005, with a machine
that can do 100 trillion calculations per second, compared to ASCI
White's 12.3 trillion.
Compaq Computer Corp. is working on
an intermediate step and plans to deliver within a couple of years a
30-trillion per second calculator.
— Reuters
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