Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons Tests

Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons Tests | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthPopSci Eco TourTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons Tests But are they accurate? By Rebecca Boyle Posted 11.02.2011 at 5:41 pm 5 Comments
Trinity Test Jack Aeby / Department of Energy

While our friends Jaguar and Ranger toil to model the Earth’s atmosphere, star formation and battery chemistry, other supercomputers are working on classified national security problems. Namely: What happens when a nuclear weapon explodes? Are we sure our nuclear arsenal would actually work, should, God forbid, we decide to use it?

Related ArticlesJaguar, What Are You Working on Today?Jaguar is Getting a GPU Upgrade, to Make it the World's Fastest Supercomputer AgainOak Ridge Labs Using World's Fastest Supercomputer to Model Next-Gen Nuclear PlantsTagsTechnology, Rebecca Boyle, lawrence livermore national laboratory, military, nuclear tests, nuclear weapons, supercomputer, supercomputersAfter live nuclear testing ended (or at least was supposed to end) in 1992, supercomputers supplanted explosions so scientists could continue studying how they work. The nation’s stockpile stewardship program, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration at three national laboratories, checks the nation’s nukes for any problems. Supercomputers at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national labs conduct tests that can in some ways go beyond the detail of any live explosion, as the Washington Post reports.

They have found some good news and some bad news, as Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., puts it: “The good news is that it tells us a lot more about these weapons than we ever knew before. The bad news is that it tells us the weapons have bigger problems that we realized,” he tells the WaPo.

For example, several years ago scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory modeled the life cycle of a nuke, from the moment it leaves storage to the instant it impacts its target. They found some fatal flaws that would cause the warhead to “fail catastrophically,” as the Post quotes Bruce T. Goodwin, Livermore’s principal associate director for weapons programs. The military has since fixed the problem, the Post reports.

The flaw lay in the weapon’s ballistics handling, not its explosivity, so this is something that could never have been revealed in a physical test, the Post notes. The power of supercomputers to model these types of things could negate the need for physical testing, some officials say — but Congress has still not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (although the U.S. abides by it). It turns out not everyone trusts supercomputers. Kyl believes while they are helpful, they’re not a substitute for testing, the Post quotes him saying. “That’s why, even though we’re not testing right now, we should not give up the legal right to test,” he said.

Click through to the Post's account for the full story on how supercomputers are helping model the most explosive forces in nature.

[Washington Post]

Previous Article: See The Data-Centric Universe, Then and NowNext Article: What Are You Doing Today, iForge? 5 Comments Link to this comment D13 11/02/11 at 10:52 pm

what further testing of "nukes" is needed?

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

Link to this comment trireme 11/03/11 at 1:27 am

@ D13- Brand-new-off-the-assembly-line nukes don't need testing, but the US stockpile has many 30+ year old nukes whose components have been bombarded by radiation for all that time. There is a program to refurbish/replace the components on these older weapons, but there is a backlog. Politicians don't like nuclear testing, but many nuclear experts don't trust the computer simulations.

Link to this comment emneumann 11/03/11 at 7:24 am

Not to mention the spontaneous degredation of the fissile and fusable elements that are the true heart of the bomb. Over time, there is less of the U-235 and Deuterium and or Tritium that would produce a lower yield in the best case or prevent a chain reaction altogether in the worst case.

Link to this comment scientific anomaly 11/03/11 at 8:20 am

well thats not extremely good that when its in mid flight it decides to take out the u.s. military base than the enemies. atleast the terrorrists would be dead in the explosion too

-Knock knock
-Who's there?
-The Doctor.
-Doctor Who?
-Yes

Link to this comment Q 11/03/11 at 8:33 am

D13,
Any and all electronic components as they are stored degrade. Some electronic components simply stop working all together sitting on the shelf. With that said, consider how old the original nuclear bombs, missiles and arsenal are. The active ones we have need to be constantly pulled and the electronics constantly test, simply because they are aging.

Besides, over the course of time as you know, there have been many improvements in electronics and so upgrades are made to the weapons too.

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What Are You Working on Today, Ranger Supercomputer?

Deep in the heart of Texas, UT's Ranger supercomputer is modeling the motions of bodies big and small
Texas Advanced Computing Center's Ranger Supercomputer TACC

This week, PopSci is peeking under the hood of some of the nation's biggest and baddest supercomputers--the machines that turn big data into big discoveries, big technologies, and big leaps forward. Over the last week, we managed to get each of the busy machines in this series on the phone to see what they were up to on during a particular day. They were happy to share.

Today we chat with the 63 thousand processing cores of the University of Texas's Ranger.

Name: Ranger

World Ranking: 17

Vital Stats: Performance: 579.4 teraflops. Inside: 3,936 quad-socket, quad-core Sun Constellation blades with 62,976 2.3 GHz AMD Opteron Barcelona cores and 123 terabytes of aggregate memory. There's 1.7 petabytes of total disk space.

So What Are You Working On?

A half-hour job to test the scalability of an application designed to model the Earth’s atmosphere. This is the kind of job-before-the-job that supercomputers do all the time. When researchers are doing big, boundary-testing science, there’s often no precedent from which to work. To test the viability of this particular atmospheric model, they have to get it on the system and see how it functions. The resulting tweaks and modifications made to the software ensure that researchers can scale it to even more cores than the roughly 33,000 that were required today. More cores means bigger science, with bigger potential payoffs.Modeling turbulent flow of the magnetized gases in the interstellar medium. It’s one in a series of simulations aimed at building a bigger picture of how stars form and why galaxies move the way they do.And spending an hour modeling radiation dosing for patients suffering from cancers. The way a radiation dose is delivered--its size, shape, duration, location, etc.--has everything to do with its efficacy. Moreover, this kind of modeling can help to reduce the side effects of radiation exposure to healthy tissues.

That's not the only biomedical science Ranger will perform today. As part of a two-day job, Ranger models a protein linked to Alzheimer’s to help out researchers in pursuit of a treatment. Much of what proteins do is tied up in their shapes and their motions. By helping them model those things today, Ranger is helping define targets for potential Alzheimer’s therapies.

Catch up with more supercomputers here.

View the original article here

Fundamental question on how life started solved: Supercomputer calculates carbon nucleus

ScienceDaily (May 10, 2011) — For carbon, the basis of life, to be able to form in the stars, a certain state of the carbon nucleus plays an essential role. In cooperation with US colleagues, physicists from the University of Bonn and Ruhr-Universität Bochum have been able to calculate this legendary carbon nucleus, solving a problem that has kept science guessing for more than 50 years.

The researchers published their results in the coming issue of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

"Attempts to calculate the Hoyle state have been unsuccessful since 1954," said Professor Dr. Ulf-G. Meißner (Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik der Universität Bonn). "But now, we have done it!" The Hoyle state is an energy-rich form of the carbon nucleus. It is the mountain pass over which all roads from one valley to the next lead: From the three nuclei of helium gas to the much larger carbon nucleus. This fusion reaction takes place in the hot interior of heavy stars. If the Hoyle state did not exist, only very little carbon or other higher elements such as oxygen, nitrogen and iron could have formed. Without this type of carbon nucleus, life probably also would not have been possible.

The search for the "slave transmitter"

The Hoyle state had been verified by experiments as early as 1954, but calculating it always failed. For this form of carbon consists of only three, very loosely linked helium nuclei -- more of a cloudy diffuse carbon nucleus. And it does not occur individually, only together with other forms of carbon. "This is as if you wanted to analyze a radio signal whose main transmitter and several slave transmitters are interfering with each other," explained Prof. Dr. Evgeny Epelbaum (Institute of Theoretical Physics II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum). The main transmitter is the stable carbon nucleus from which humans -- among others -- are made. "But we are interested in one of the unstable, energy-rich carbon nuclei; so we have to separate the weaker radio transmitter somehow from the dominant signal by means of a noise filter."

What made this possible was a new, improved calculating approach the researchers used that allowed calculating the forces between several nuclear particles more precisely than ever. And in JUGENE, the supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich, a suitable tool was found. It took JUGENE almost a week of calculating. The results matched the experimental data so well that the researchers can be certain that they have indeed calculated the Hoyle state.

More about how the Universe came into existence

"Now we can analyze this exciting and essential form of the carbon nucleus in every detail," explained Prof. Meißner. "We will determine how big it is, and what its structure is. And it also means that we can now take a very close look at the entire chain of how elements are formed."

In future, this may even allow answering philosophical questions using science. For decades, the Hoyle state was a prime example for the theory that natural constants must have precisely their experimentally determined values, and not any different ones, since otherwise we would not be here to observe the Universe (the anthropic principle). "For the Hoyle state this means that it must have exactly the amount of energy it has, or else, we would not exist," said Prof. Meißner. "Now we can calculate whether -- in a changed world with other parameters -- the Hoyle state would indeed have a different energy when comparing the mass of three helium nuclei." If this is so, this would confirm the anthropic principle.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Bonn.

Journal Reference:

Evgeny Epelbaum, Hermann Krebs, Dean Lee, Ulf-G. Meißner. Ab Initio Calculation of the Hoyle State. Physical Review Letters, 2011; 106 (19) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.192501

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Fundamental question on how life started solved: Supercomputer calculates carbon nucleus

ScienceDaily (May 10, 2011) — For carbon, the basis of life, to be able to form in the stars, a certain state of the carbon nucleus plays an essential role. In cooperation with US colleagues, physicists from the University of Bonn and Ruhr-Universität Bochum have been able to calculate this legendary carbon nucleus, solving a problem that has kept science guessing for more than 50 years.

The researchers published their results in the coming issue of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

"Attempts to calculate the Hoyle state have been unsuccessful since 1954," said Professor Dr. Ulf-G. Meißner (Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik der Universität Bonn). "But now, we have done it!" The Hoyle state is an energy-rich form of the carbon nucleus. It is the mountain pass over which all roads from one valley to the next lead: From the three nuclei of helium gas to the much larger carbon nucleus. This fusion reaction takes place in the hot interior of heavy stars. If the Hoyle state did not exist, only very little carbon or other higher elements such as oxygen, nitrogen and iron could have formed. Without this type of carbon nucleus, life probably also would not have been possible.

The search for the "slave transmitter"

The Hoyle state had been verified by experiments as early as 1954, but calculating it always failed. For this form of carbon consists of only three, very loosely linked helium nuclei -- more of a cloudy diffuse carbon nucleus. And it does not occur individually, only together with other forms of carbon. "This is as if you wanted to analyze a radio signal whose main transmitter and several slave transmitters are interfering with each other," explained Prof. Dr. Evgeny Epelbaum (Institute of Theoretical Physics II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum). The main transmitter is the stable carbon nucleus from which humans -- among others -- are made. "But we are interested in one of the unstable, energy-rich carbon nuclei; so we have to separate the weaker radio transmitter somehow from the dominant signal by means of a noise filter."

What made this possible was a new, improved calculating approach the researchers used that allowed calculating the forces between several nuclear particles more precisely than ever. And in JUGENE, the supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich, a suitable tool was found. It took JUGENE almost a week of calculating. The results matched the experimental data so well that the researchers can be certain that they have indeed calculated the Hoyle state.

More about how the Universe came into existence

"Now we can analyze this exciting and essential form of the carbon nucleus in every detail," explained Prof. Meißner. "We will determine how big it is, and what its structure is. And it also means that we can now take a very close look at the entire chain of how elements are formed."

In future, this may even allow answering philosophical questions using science. For decades, the Hoyle state was a prime example for the theory that natural constants must have precisely their experimentally determined values, and not any different ones, since otherwise we would not be here to observe the Universe (the anthropic principle). "For the Hoyle state this means that it must have exactly the amount of energy it has, or else, we would not exist," said Prof. Meißner. "Now we can calculate whether -- in a changed world with other parameters -- the Hoyle state would indeed have a different energy when comparing the mass of three helium nuclei." If this is so, this would confirm the anthropic principle.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Bonn.

Journal Reference:

Evgeny Epelbaum, Hermann Krebs, Dean Lee, Ulf-G. Meißner. Ab Initio Calculation of the Hoyle State. Physical Review Letters, 2011; 106 (19) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.192501

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here