By Greg Seigle
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Using the world’s fastest and most capable supercomputer, the National Nuclear Security Administration has conducted three-dimensional simulations of nuclear explosions critical to the maintenance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the Energy Department announced last week (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2001).

The two simulations, which occurred continuously over the past four months on a remote connection between the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, signify an important milestone for NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program, which is responsible for maintaining the safety, security and reliability of U.S. nuclear warheads, NNSA officials said in a news release.

“This is a significant technical achievement,” said NNSA Administrator John Gordon.  “The NNSA’s role in spurring the development of some of the fastest computers in the world is already paying dividends.  We can now simulate an entire nuclear weapon explosion and learn critical information about the nation’s weapon stockpile as it ages.”

The ability to simulate a nuclear explosion enables U.S. scientists to examine key physics issues through a combination of simulation, precision experiments and analysis of data from past nuclear tests, NNSA officials said. 

Having a firmer grasp of the physics of a nuclear explosion is “crucial” to the making of replacement weapon components and the refurbishing of aging nuclear warheads, they said.

The first phase of the ongoing simulation program focused on the development of supercomputers that possess unprecedented speed and capacity, officials said.  Now it also seeks to develop multiple physics simulation codes needed to identify, diagnose and correct potential flaws in the aging U.S. arsenal, they added. 

The supercomputer used for these simulations transmitted about 35 times the amount of information stored in the world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, according to the release.

“Our simulation was run remotely from Los Alamos on the White machine at Livermore, more than 1,000 miles away,” said project leader Bob Weaver, referring to the laboratories located in, respectively, New Mexico and California.  “Thanks to the secure network connecting the laboratories, this remote computing effort worked almost as easily as computing on a local supercomputer at Los Alamos.”

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