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El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

(spectrum.ieee.org)
93 points rbanffy | 9 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:52 UTC | HN request time: 1.575s | source | bottom
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balia ◴[19 Nov 24 21:53 UTC] No.42188494[source]▶
Some may not want to hear this, but these “fastest supercomputer” list is now meaningless because all the Chinese labs have started obfuscating their progress.

A while ago there were a few labs in China in top 10 and they all attracted sanctions / bad attention. Now no Chinese lab report any data now

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1. leptons ◴[19 Nov 24 22:43 UTC] No.42188870[source]▶
I doubt the US Government is telling everyone about their fastest computer.
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2. grapesodaaaaa ◴[20 Nov 24 00:47 UTC] No.42189701[source]▶
The DOE has entered the chat.

(after the nuclear test ban treaty, they run a LOT of simulations)

replies(1): >>42189717 #
3. buildbot ◴[20 Nov 24 00:49 UTC] No.42189713[source]▶
Unless it's like, air gapped powered by a naval nuclear reactor, I feel like someone would question why a random US gov building is drawing 20-30MW of power, and exhausting most of that as heat...
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4. buildbot ◴[20 Nov 24 00:50 UTC] No.42189717[source]▶
Isn't that the open secret for El Cap? "Classified workloads" aka weapons sims.
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5. sliken ◴[20 Nov 24 00:56 UTC] No.42189759{3}[source]▶
Not a secret, from IEEE:

The NNSA—which oversees Lawrence Livermore as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories—plans to use El Capitan to “model and predict nuclear weapon performance, aging effects, and safety,”

6. ethbr1 ◴[20 Nov 24 02:47 UTC] No.42190405[source]▶
Aside from the utility, who would know? There's a lot of land out there, relative to the size of even a very large building.
7. remram ◴[20 Nov 24 03:00 UTC] No.42190474[source]▶
Not disagreeing with you but how could any building draw power without radiating most of it as heat?
8. wang_li ◴[20 Nov 24 17:05 UTC] No.42195968[source]▶
How do you tell the difference between a datacenter and a supercomputer cluster? According to wikipedia, the government data center in Utah is pulling 65 MW.
9. leptons ◴[20 Nov 24 17:23 UTC] No.42196163{3}[source]▶
There's no real secret about nuclear weapons simulations. Sure the software they use is protected and "secret", but the real secret computing facilities are likely there to break encryption and spy on everyone. Nuclear weapons simulations don't really give the US a tactical advantage, but breaking encryption does, and so that kind of compute power would be kept secret.