By Bryan Bender
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Energy Department has awarded a $290 million contract to IBM to build the world’s two fastest supercomputers to assess the safety, security and reliability of nuclear weapons without underground nuclear tests, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said today (see related GSN story, today).

Named Purple and BlueGene/L, the computers should be able to conduct 100 trillion and 360 trillion calculations per second, respectively.  Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories plan to use the computers to “gain unprecedented understanding of the health of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and the effects of aging and parts replacement over time,” Abraham told the Supercomputer 2002 Conference in Baltimore.

The contract award comes as the Bush administration debates whether the moratorium on underground nuclear tests should be lifted in order to fully assess the health of the nuclear force or test weapons designs now being studied (see GSN, Nov. 15).  Some U.S. officials want to end the moratorium on nuclear testing in the United States, but several U.S. experts said last week that there is little to gain from nuclear testing and much to lose (see GSN, Oct. 22).

“This is a vital step in providing the resources to develop high-fidelity, three-dimensional simulations to predict the behavior of aging nuclear weapons for out national security,” acting National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Linton Brooks said today.

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