World's Fastest Computer Unveiled

from www.reuters.com
Last Updated: August 15, 2001 09:55 PM ET

LIVERMORE, Calif. (Reuters) - A U.S. government laboratory unveiled on Wednesday the most powerful computer in the world, programmed to simulate the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

ASCI White, a $110 million computer squeezed into enough refrigerator-sized units to fill a couple of basketball courts, was officially unveiled by scientists aiming to simulate nuclear tests the government has promised not to carry out for real.

The beast, built by International Business Machines Corp. IBM.N from off-the-shelf processors with a souped-up version of its commercial operating system, AIX, weighs as much as 17 full-size elephants, takes as much cooling as 765 homes, and can do in a second what a calculator would take 10 million years, IBM says.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government funded laboratory which is home to the machine, aims to find out a bit quicker than that how an atomic bomb blows up so that it does not have to test any more.

"We are in a race against time as we have to pass the baton to a new generation of nuclear engineers who have neither designed nor tested a nuclear weapon," said David Schwoegler, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore.

The last U.S. underground test was about 10 years ago.

Like gunfighters after the taming of the West, U.S. nuclear scientists who have designed and exploded nuclear weapons are a dying breed. Computers are being brought in to fill the gap.

The 10-year Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, ASCI, is about half-way done.

It aims to produce a computer that can simulate a nuclear explosion by 2005, with a machine that can do 100 trillion calculations per second, compared to ASCI White's 12.3 trillion.

Compaq Computer Corp.CPQ.N is working on an intermediate step and plans to deliver within a couple of years a 30-trillion per second calculator.