Mersenne: Re: Thoughts
The fastest unclassified machine at the moment is ... used for modeling nuclear processes, "to maintain USA's nuclear stockpiles without the need of further nuclear tests". Am I the only one to whom this makes no sense? Here's a news story that may help. It's from the Albuquerque (NM) Journal. full story at http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1sci11-12.htm an excerpt: Lab officials say the real test comes not in speed tests but in performing real nuclear weapons simulations. Sandia National Laboratories is now in the midst of the first real example of substituting computers for testing, said Sandia vice president Roger Hagengruber. Martinez and his staff are developing a new neutron generator for the W76, a type of nuclear warhead carried on Navy submarines. Neutron generators are electronic devices small enough to fit in the palm of your hand that create a burst of subatomic particles to help detonate a nuclear weapon. Without underground nuclear tests, and with other Energy Department test facilities unavailable, computer simulations are the only way to collect the data needed to certify that the neutron generator will perform the way it's supposed to, Hagengruber said. -roger
Mersenne: Re: Thoughts
I agree that modeling nuclear detonations take a lot of computing power. (Somewhere, I read that given all the heavy water w/deuterium in the Earth's oceans, one could build a nuke powerful enough to implode and make a small black hole. Anyone interested in doing the energy/pressure/temperature gas law calculations on that one?) However, I'm pretty sure that this couldn't be done on a distributed parallelistic basis. (Is that even a word--parallelistic?) For the life of me, I can't figure out how to distribute the mathematics. It seems that each region of the space where the explosion is happening needs constant information from most of the others (or maybe just those directly adjacent). How could this be done without direct connections between the parallel processors? From my point of view, comparing GIMPS with Pacific Blue seems as useful as comparing apples and oranges, or maybe uranium-235 and carbon-14. -- Blake Stacey Executive Director of Programming HyperSphere Software [EMAIL PROTECTED] :: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~bstacey Some chairs are ergonomic. No junk bond is ergonomic. Therefore, some chairs are not junk bonds.
