←back to thread

El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

(spectrum.ieee.org)
93 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
Show context
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"

replies(10): >>42188257 #>>42188268 #>>42188277 #>>42188283 #>>42188293 #>>42188324 #>>42189425 #>>42189704 #>>42189996 #>>42190235 #
1. rcxdude ◴[20 Nov 24 00:02 UTC] No.42189425[source]▶
>Are they trying to model every single atom?

Modelling a single nucleus, even one much lighter weight than uranium, is a captital-H Hard Problem involving many subject matter experts and a lot of optimisation work far beyond 'just throw it on a GPU'. Quantum systems get non-tractable without very clever approximations and a lot of compute very quickly, and quantum chromodynamics is by far the worst at this. Look up lattice QCD for a relevant keyword.