The United States simulates nuclear explosions on IBM’s Asci White computer—one of the fastest computers in the world—rather than conducting live tests, according to a BBC report yesterday.

“We have to have the capability to simulate the explosion of a nuclear warhead,” said David Novak, deputy associate director of the Asci program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  “That’s very challenging.”

The Asci White consists of over 8,000 processors linked together by a high-speed network.  It is the size of two basketball courts and can conduct over 12 trillion calculations per second.

Researchers also use the computer to study how the composition of material in nuclear weapons changes over time.  Nuclear warheads are affected by radioactive decay and exposure to a variety of environmental conditions (David Jamieson, BBC, Dec. 2).

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