Thanks to a new computer capable of calculating at a rate of up to 1.8 trillion operations per second, researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., now have a vastly improved tool for simulating various scenarios involving nuclear weapons. Assembled from 9,072 Pentium Pro microprocessors, originally developed by Intel for use in workstations and servers, the computer covers an area roughly equal to the floor space of a modest home. Installation of the full computer at Sandia was completed late last month. Even before all the processors had been installed, Sandia researchers were running simulations on the computer. One key effort modeled, in four separate stages, the crash of an airplane carrying a nuclear warhead.
Preliminary results provide insights into such complex phenomena as wind-fanned fires.
The simulations reveal, for example, that air rushing past a column of flames spawns vortices that greatly intensify the fire. The temperatures are highest at the fringes of the inferno. At the same time, researchers are discovering they need experimental data to feed into their models and to validate their findings. In the missile simulation, for example, new experiments had to be performed to determine how the special solid foam in which electronic components are packed responds to heat. Reaching 1 trillion calculations per second.