IBM Wins U.S. Contract to Build Supercomputer
The Energy Department awarded an $85-million contract to IBM Corp. on Thursday to build a new supercomputer that will be used to simulate the detonation of nuclear warheads, allowing scientists to evaluate the nation’s arsenal without performing test explosions.
The contract is part of a multiyear federal program to acquire computers thousands of times more powerful than everyday PCs for use in national defense laboratories.
The credibility and success of the program is key to White House efforts to demonstrate that actual nuclear tests are unnecessary and to persuade the Senate to ratify a test-ban treaty signed by President Clinton two years ago.
The new machine has 8,192 processors working in tandem to execute up to 10 trillion calculations per second, roughly 250,000 times faster than a typical PC. It is scheduled to be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2000.
“We need new supercomputational powers so we can certify that our weapons are safe, secure and reliable without testing,” said Energy Secretary Federico Pena.
The United States has not conducted nuclear tests since Clinton announced a moratorium in 1992. Instead, the U.S. is spending $40 billion over the next decade to assure the reliability of the stockpile with an array of new technology, including physics machinery the size of football stadiums.
Thursday’s announcement was the latest in a series of Energy Department purchases of supercomputers for national laboratories. IBM is already under contract to deliver a separate machine to Livermore in 1999. Intel Corp. and Cray Research also have deals to supply supercomputers to the Sandia and Los Alamos laboratories in New Mexico.
The advanced computers allow scientists to conduct virtual tests on the nation’s aging stockpile of 6,000 to 7,000 nuclear weapons. Pena said testing systems use archived data from roughly 1,000 nuclear explosions conducted over five decades before the moratorium, as well as ongoing tests of the nonnuclear components of weapons systems.
Randy Christensen, deputy program manager at Lawrence Livermore, said the new computer would allow far more detailed testing than existing computers, which are only three to four times as powerful as a PC. Two-dimensional experiments, for example, can be expanded to three dimensions on the new computer.
Many of the tests--which allow scientists to view simulations of even small components on a video screen--are designed to explore how a weapon might be affected by deterioration that occurs over years of inactivity. As nuclear warheads age, plastic explosives undergo chemical changes and the hollow plutonium core can crack and corrode.
Christensen said the nation’s labs are under pressure to get the new supercomputers in place--and develop necessary software--because many scientists who helped build the nuclear program are expected to retire over the next decade.
“We have two pacing factors,” Christensen said, “the aging of the experts and the aging of the weapons.”
IBM officials said the new machine--with 512 nodes, each with 16 microprocessors--would have much in common with others already in use by Charles Schwab for online stock trades and United Airlines to maximize passenger loads. The technology behind the RS/6000 SP, as it is called, was also used in IBM’s Deep Blue machine that defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov last year.
Department of Energy officials said the government plans to award a contract for an even more powerful computer for delivery in 2004, one capable of 100 trillion calculations per second.
