IBM has revealed that it will soon be delivering its new supercomputer, ASCI (Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative) White, to the U.S. Department of Energy, where it will be used to model atomic detonations…The company claims that the computer, possessing 8,192 processors spread among 512 nodes and covering a floor area equivalent to two basketball courts, will be the most powerful computer in the world, able to continually process three trillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS) with a peak of 12 trillion FLOPS (teraflops) - the equivalent of every man, woman and child on Earth adding 2,000 numbers per second. That?s about four times faster than the previous record holder, another IBM creation that performed 3 trillion calculations per second, or 3 teraflops. The average home PC, for your reference, can perform a maximum of about 400 million calculations per second - about 30,000 times slower than IBMs new machineThe $110,000,000 beast consumes 1.2 million Watts of electricity, enough juice to power 1000 homes, and weighs as much as 17 adult Indian elephants. It will be deployed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where it will be used for nuclear weapons simulations. The monstrous engine - actually 512 computers, and 8,192 microprocessors linked together - is designed to precisely simulate the explosion of nuclear weapons, removing the need for real-world nuclear testing. ‘The only other way to do this would be to take old nuclear weapons and blow them up. This really is a bargain,’ said Earl Josephs, high-performance computing analyst for IDC.But even this Big Daddy of a ‘puter is about 10 times too slow for the task at hand ? a precise modeling of what might happen to the US? aging arsenal of nuclear weapons if they were to be exploded. Getting realistic results that account for the actual complexity of the real world requires a near-infinite set of variables, meaning even today?s fastest computers can create only rough estimates. Such a margin of error is hardly acceptable when monitoring the degradation of nuclear weapons.‘Right now the calculations are very crude,’ admits David Nowak, deputy associate director of Lawrence Livermore. ‘We need orders of magnitude more accuracy considering the safety issues involved and costs of rebuilding the stockpile.’ Nowak says it’s too early to tell if future computers will be able to substitute for real-world testing.IBM’s machine is part of a five-stage programme initiated by the Department of Energy in 1998 to solicit construction of a massive computer which can perform 100 trillion calculations per second, about 10 times faster than ASCI White. Stage four involves construction of a 30 trillion calculation machine within the next couple of years; the 100 trillion machine is expected by 2004.

Such a computer, according to the lab, would be able to run a full simulation of the first 1/100 of a second of a nuclear warhead discharge in about one month. It would take ASCI White much longer to run such a complete, three-dimensional simulation, so it will be used to run smaller-scale, more crude simulations.