El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
spectrum.ieee.org
El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#2Anybody know what "Inertial Confinement Fusion" is in the referenced article?
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#3> El Capitan, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., can perform over 2700 quadrillion operations per second at its peak. The previous record holder, Frontier, could do just over 2000 quadrillion peak operations per second.
> El Capitan uses AMD’s MI300a chip, dubbed an accelerated processing unit, which combines a CPU and GPU in one package. In total, the system boasts 44,544 MI300As, connected together by HPE’s Slingshot interconnects.
Seems like a nice win for AMD.
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#4So, they built this supercomputer to test new and more deadly nuclear weapons. That makes me so "happy". I am absolutely not worried about two nuclear powers being close to the brink of direct war, even as we speak; nor about the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty; nor about the repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers. Everything is great and I'll just fawn over the colorful livery and the petaflops figure.
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#5Anybody know what "Inertial Confinement Fusion" is in the referenced article?
> what "Inertial Confinement Fusion" is
The experimental fusion approach used by the NIF [1][2].
It's conveniently simultaneously an approach to fusion power, a way to study fusion plasmas and a tiny nuclear explosion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#6So, they built this supercomputer to test new and more deadly nuclear weapons. That makes me so "happy". I am absolutely not worried about two nuclear powers being close to the brink of direct war, even as we speak; nor about the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty; nor about the repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers. Everything is great and I'll just fawn over the colorful li…
I'd guess it's unlikely to be the real use case. The real one is classified. Plus it's not like more deadly nuclear weapons would change anything, we can do bad enough with what we already have.
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#7I fail to understand how these nuclear bomb simulations require so much compute power.
Are they trying to model every single atom?
Is this a case where the physicists in charge get away with programming the most inefficient models possible and then the administration simply replies "oh I guess we'll need a bigger supercomputer"
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#8So, they built this supercomputer to test new and more deadly nuclear weapons. That makes me so "happy". I am absolutely not worried about two nuclear powers being close to the brink of direct war, even as we speak; nor about the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty; nor about the repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers. Everything is great and I'll just fawn over the colorful li…
> they built this supercomputer to test new and more deadly nuclear weapons
If you are afraid of nuclear war, the thing to fear is a nuclear state's capacity to retaliate being questioned. These supercomputers are the alternative to live tests. Taking them away doesn't poof nuclear weapons, it means you are left with a half-assed deterrent or must resume live tests.
> the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty
North Korea, the American interventions in the Middle East and Ukraine set the precedent that nuclear sovereignty is in a separate category from the treaty-enforced kind. Non-proliferation won't be made or broken on the back of aging, degrading weapons.
> repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers
One invites war by refusing to prepare for it.
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#9So, they built this supercomputer to test new and more deadly nuclear weapons. That makes me so "happy". I am absolutely not worried about two nuclear powers being close to the brink of direct war, even as we speak; nor about the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty; nor about the repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers. Everything is great and I'll just fawn over the colorful li…
I'd guess it's unlikely to be the real use case. The real one is classified. Plus it's not like more deadly nuclear weapons would change anything, we can do bad enough with what we already have.
> it's unlikely to be the real use case. The real one is classified.
What are you basing this on?
> it's not like more deadly nuclear weapons would change anything
We haven't been chasing yield in nuclear weapons since the 60s.
Our oldest warheads date from the 60s [1]. For obvious reasons, the experimental track record on half-century old pits is scarce. We don't know if novel physics or chemistry is going on in there, and we don't want to be the second ones to find out.
Re: El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest
#10So, they built this supercomputer to test new and more deadly nuclear weapons. That makes me so "happy". I am absolutely not worried about two nuclear powers being close to the brink of direct war, even as we speak; nor about the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty; nor about the repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers. Everything is great and I'll just fawn over the colorful li…
The whole point of testing (and making) deadly nuclear weapons is to ensure they are never used again. The Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine has kept us alive through the darkest pf the Cold War (also keeping the Cold War cold). In order to credibly threaten anyone who tries to annihilate you with certain annihilation is with lots of such doomsday weapons. We have lived in this Mexican standoff for longer than we remember.