Los Alamos super reports for nuke duty Well, recess is over for the "Roadrunner" massively parallel supercomputer running at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It is time to get on with nuclear simulations that circumvent the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Today, Los Alamos announced that the Roadrunner super - which is a clustered blade server that mixes Opteron-based …
"DOE doesn't want to talk about any of that, of course, but it wanted to point out today that as part of Roadrunner's shakedown, the techies at Los Alamos allowed ten different petascale workloads to run around like a crazy bird on the cluster." ...... Some would say that that, at Los Alamos, is a suitably Manic Control Parameter when BetaTesting Phenomenal Power Configurations/Conflagrations/Disturbances in the Force :-)
Firstly a nuclear weapon that fails to work is actually somewhat safer than one that works as expected.
Secondly only one of these is likely to have you sat inside it several thousand feet up in the air when the advantages of physical prototyping decide to make themselves known.
I had the rather dubious pleasure of flying on one of the first 777s very shortly after it entered service with Emirates*. While the staying in the air side of things worked as expected**, absolutely bugger all else did. For teething troubles this thing was the equivalent of a T-Rex with advanced gum disease.
*Not their fault and they were very apologetic. This black mark does not affect my overall opinion that they are the best airline out there.
**Presumably. I didn't get into the cockpit, but if the avionics were anywhere near as fubar as the rest of it the pilots would have been sitting in the dark and looking out of the windows a lot.
"a nuclear weapon that fails to work is actually somewhat safer than one that works as expected"
However, a nuke that works unexpectedly is rather more dangerous! Left a bit, left a bit more, just a tad *BOOM*
The bit that worries me is that physicists are the worst type of scientist for going "hey we have this model of X which is almost 100% accurate. It just doesn't take account of Y. Other than that it's perfect!". Gravity? We've heard of it.
It's fine for most things, but whether or not your stockpile of 1000s of nukes is safe to maintain is maybe not one of them...
Still, I look forward to the home version. Real time radiosity may well be just around the corner.
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