04/03/2005

Apparently the world’s fastest computer is up and running at the National Nuclear Security Administration, and it’s only half-complete. It hums along at 135 trillion operations per second. Yowza.

Perhaps the best line from the NNSA’s press release, though, is this gem:

“Scientists at LLNL for the first time have performed 16-million-atom molecular dynamics simulations with the highest accuracy inter-atomic potentials necessary to resolve the key physical effects to successfully model pressure induced rapid resolidification in Tantalum.”

Hunh? It probably took a supercomputer just to write a sentence like that. But it sounds cool.