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Supercomputer Made From Ps3 Chips


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The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world's fastest machine, also built by IBM.

 

It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile.

 

 

The current fastest supercomputer is IBM's Blue Gene/L, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

 

It is used in the US Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which oversees the country's nuclear weapons.

 

 

Why is such vast processing power required to monitor the US nuclear stockpile? OK, they've got quite a few more weapons than most of the remaining nuclear powers, but what's wrong with a simple Excel sheet?

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Why is such vast processing power required to monitor the US nuclear stockpile? OK, they've got quite a few more weapons than most of the remaining nuclear powers, but what's wrong with a simple Excel sheet?

 

Nuclear arms degrade over time, and are subject to a kind of "use by" date, and part of monitoring the stockpile consists of assessing their state. The only two ways of doing that are through test explosions (which aren't masively popular) and mathematical modelling. The latter is the preferred method but it takes a massive amount of computer power to accurately model these things (and when dealing with nukes the more accurate the better really).

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