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El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

(spectrum.ieee.org)
93 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.403s | source
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olao99 ◴[19 Nov 24 21:23 UTC] No.42188229[source]▶
I 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"

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1. TeMPOraL ◴[19 Nov 24 21:26 UTC] No.42188257[source]▶
Pot, meet kettle? It's usually the industry that's leading with "write inefficient code, hardware is cheaper than dev time" approach. If anything, I'd expect a long-running physics research project to have well-optimized code. After all, that's where all the optimized math routines come from.
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2. glial ◴[20 Nov 24 06:09 UTC] No.42191206[source]▶
I bet the bulk of it is still super-fast Fortran code.