Comment Re:Nuclear Simulations (Score 1) 260
I guess I was talking about fission/fusion reactions, although I have to say that I hadn't really considered radiation damage.
The extent of my knowledge on this is that I spent a summer working on supercomputing at Los Alamos, and this was the explanation I heard for why simulating nuclear explosions was necessary.
Not having a security clearance, I didn't get any more details than that. But, I have to agree with the original post. At least in terms of how the research grants are justified, nuclear simulation (due to restrictions from the test ban treaty) and weather/climate modeling are two major applications for supercomputing.
I didn't pursue the field at the time, because I wasn't really interested in either of those applications. So, I would be very interested to hear more about other applications that you know of for supercomputing. (I'm talking about high-end massively parallel number-crunching...I would put things like computational genetics in a different category, because they are really more of a database problem)
I'd also imagine that there are applications that are not tractable now, but will be when the horsepower is increased. What are these applications of tomorrow?
The extent of my knowledge on this is that I spent a summer working on supercomputing at Los Alamos, and this was the explanation I heard for why simulating nuclear explosions was necessary.
Not having a security clearance, I didn't get any more details than that. But, I have to agree with the original post. At least in terms of how the research grants are justified, nuclear simulation (due to restrictions from the test ban treaty) and weather/climate modeling are two major applications for supercomputing.
I didn't pursue the field at the time, because I wasn't really interested in either of those applications. So, I would be very interested to hear more about other applications that you know of for supercomputing. (I'm talking about high-end massively parallel number-crunching...I would put things like computational genetics in a different category, because they are really more of a database problem)
I'd also imagine that there are applications that are not tractable now, but will be when the horsepower is increased. What are these applications of tomorrow?
