John Astad's List: Technology

• Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. Here, with 500 petaflops of processing power at their fingertips,
• One exaflop is 1,000 times faster than a petaflop.
• 1,000 trillion operations per second.
• yet it's still not quite fast enough to run some of the most intense global weather simulations, nuclear tests and brain modelling tasks that modern science demands.
• move to exascale is therefore critical,
• Ed Turkel

  • http://www.iccs-meeting.org/iccs2008/Ed-Turkel.pdf
• Mark Seager, the Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology at Lawrence Livermore.

  • Dr. Seager received his B.S. Degree in Mathematics and Astrophysics at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in 1979 and received his PhD in Numerical Analysis from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Mark started working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1983 and has been working in the field of parallel processing ever since. He manages the Platforms Program for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASCI) Program at LLNL and has successfully managed partnership to successfly deply architectures such as ASCI Blue Pacific (3.9 TF/s in 1998), ASCI White (12.3 TF/s in 2000) and the powerful LLNL Linux clusters (MCR at 11.3 TF/s in 2002 and Thunder at 23 TF/s in 2004). He is currently managing the IBM contract for ASCI Purple (100 TF/s in 2H05) and BlueGene/L (180/360 TF/s in 1H2005). His current interests include advanced technology and scalable systems architecture, performance and commodity based high performance computing.
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• If one faulty part of the stockpile is not detected and remedied, it could explode – and then set the other weapons off. Suddenly the problem of projecting behaviour becomes a whole lot more complex.

  • This is good information to know
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• At exascale speeds, researchers would not only be able to examine all of the data, they would also be able to see the complex relationships between one part of the nuclear stockpile and the others.

  • Exascale speeds is the way to go
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• femtoseconds (a tenth to a fifteenth of a second)

  • Femtoseconds...okay I got it
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