Nicole Volpe
NEW YORK: International Business Machines Corp. on Wednesday was set to
unveil the fastest computer in the world, which the US government will use to
simulate nuclear weapons tests.
The supercomputer, able to process more in a second than one person with a
calculator could do in 10 million years, was made for the Department of Energy's
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The system could ease
congressional opposition to the United States signing the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, banning all actual nuclear weapons testing worldwide.
"Without underground testing, we need simulations to make sure the
stockpile is safe, reliable and operational," said David Cooper, a member
of the President's Council on Computing and chief information officer of
Lawrence Livermore Labs in California, where the system will be run. Called ASCI
White, the supercomputer will churn the factors involved in a nuclear
detonation, including the weapon's age and design. This could eventually allow
the government to manage its entire stockpile of nuclear weapons without any
real nuclear tests, Cooper said.
The US Senate last year failed to ratify the test ban treaty, insisting on
the nation's right to continue testing nuclear weapons underground.
"If you polled the weapons designers right now, they would say that
(actual) testing is still more effective," Cooper said.
The new supercomputer is a major step towards full simulation but is not yet
capable of testing the nuclear weapons stockpile to standards set by experts.
A system that could replace actual nuclear tests must have a computing
capability of 100 teraflops, or trillions of operations per second, versus the
ASCI White computing capacity as tested by IBM of 12.3 teraflops, Cooper said.
"We're still on a time scale to do (100 teraflops) by 2004," he added.
The system contains 8,192 copper microprocessors and is 1,000 times more
powerful than its chess-playing predecessor "Deep Blue," which
defeated world champion Gary Kasparov in the historic 1997 chess showdown
between man and machine.
IBM is selling the system, which will take up the floor space equivalent to
two basketball courts and weighs as much as 17 full-sized elephants, to the DoE
for $110 million.
But designing the most powerful computer in the world has other pay-offs to
IBM, including bragging rights that could allow it to take a greater share in
the supercomputer market, as well as the use of the advanced technology in its
lower-level computer products.
"We're seeing more and more that deep computing will become a critical
element in how real businesses run every day, and that it's not just in the
territory of the propeller heads," said IBM senior vice president
technology and manufacturing Nicholas Donofrio.
IBM officials and analysts said parts of the design of ASCI White, which
connects 512 separate computers together with high performance switches and
software, could be built into computers used for everything from electronic
business to designing cars.
IBM often sells its leading edge technologies to its own rivals in the
computer industry, using the proceeds to continue to fund its enormous research
and development budget.
"We could take elements of this system and sell it to other
people," said Donofrio. "Some of the things that might find their way
from ASCI White into the other people's systems are the switch or chips that do
the memory control."
"This is part of IBM's product road map," said DH Brown analyst
Richard Partridge. "They have the government fund the extreme end and make
sure they address all the difficult problems before they create products for
tasks that are not as difficult as nuclear weapons stockpile management."
In 1999, IBM became the leader in the traditional supercomputer market, in
which some 250 computers that range in price from $2 million to $100 million are
sold every year, for use in weather predictions, research and encryption,
according to Joseph. IBM now has 30 per cent of that market, Joseph said.
"This system becomes the biggest computer on earth," said Joseph.
"Having that kind of market presence is everything in the traditional
supercomputer market and will allow them to take more market share."
(C) Reuters Limited 2000.