But to get a computerized visual of a complex reaction occurring in just three-billionths of a second would require software capable of processing millions of data elements quickly. Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative has five large contracts with universities to develop some aspect of visualization computing, said Derrol Hammer, high-performance computing procurement group leader at Lawrence Livermore. The institutions are Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Utah. ASCI is collaborating with Computational Engineering International of Morrisville, N.C., to make its Ensight graphics software scalable for the lab's purposes, Quinn said. Ensight software lets scientists slice the action into planes and actually see what is going on in different sections of the capsule as it implodes, she said.
Scientists can also do a particle trace, following it through the capsule as the action occurs.
Late last year, Lawrence Livermore successfully completed the first 3-D simulation of a nuclear weapon primary explosion using its ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer, one of the most powerful computers in the world, and MeshTV software. To simulate a primary explosion on a computer required 300G of RAM and some 20 days to complete the calculation. DOE estimated that such a calculation on a regular desktop computer would have taken 30 years to complete. It can perform 3.88 trillion floating-point operations per second and has 75T of space, enough to store the contents of all the books in the Library of Congress. The servers employ switched video and remote rendering to the analysts' workstations, providing multiple levels of graphics capabilities, officials said.