US to Simulate Nuke Tests Using Cray Supercomputers

Supercomputer manufacturer, Cray, is said to help the US guard its arsenal of nukes after winning a $174 million contract to provide a new supercomputer to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The current supercomputer, a Cray XE6 called “Cielo”, is said to have 107,152 cores and a theoretical peak performance of a little over 1028 TFlops. The new supercomputer, which is a Cray XC super model going by the name of “Trinity”, is said to be connected to the company’s Sonexion storage at Los Alamos and is expected to provide 8x the power of the current XE6. The new supercomputer is said to be a joint project between “the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale (ACES) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories as part of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC)”.

Trinity is said to be based on Intel’s Xeon Haswell processors and the upcoming “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors, boasting a 82 PB capacity and a design throughput of 1.7 TB per second. Its main purpose is to test the nuke arsenal’s safety, security, reliability and performance, in addition to conducting simulations of the US nuke stockpile in order to understand the weapons’ integrity as they age, while avoiding the need for underground detonations of devices.

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