New IBM supercomputer to "babysit" U.S nukes

Since im new here and im a bit confused where to post this, but i hope this will come out right.

Anways, the leading newspaper of Norway; VG(www.vg.no) have an article about IBM is to produce a new supercomputer for the U.S gov. to take care of their nuclear arsenal. In a comment made by Mark Seager, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory(where it is going to be situated) that the purpose of this computer is to check weither the nukes is capable of starting/functioning when needed, just like a car that has been in the garage for 20-30 years. "How do you maintain it and know if it going to start"?

The supercomputer is going to be called Sequoia, and have the insane speed of 20 petaflops. This will be ready in 2012.

Dunno if this is any interesting, but i could not find any info elsewhere on this so i choosed to post it just in case anybody find it interesting.

can you link any sources buddy?

reply to post by kuhl






IBM bygger atombarnevakt

Det er det amerikanske Energidepartementet som har bestilt regnemaskinen, og den kommer til å bli plassert på Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory i California.

- Problemet med vårt atombombe-arsenal kan sammenlignes med et du kanskje har hjemme, om du har hatt en bil stående ubrukt i garasjen i 20 eller 30 år. Hvordan kan man vedlikeholde bilen i løpet av den tiden, og samtidig være sikker på at den vil starte når den skal? sier assisterende avdelingssjef for avansert teknologi, Mark Seager, ved Lawrence Livermore.

Forskere har jobbet med problemet lenge, men trenger et kraftigere system for å beregne områder innen fysikken de ennå ikke har taklet, og finregne på feilmarginer.

Originally posted by BenDozer
Since im new here and im a bit confused where to post this, but i hope this will come out right.

Anways, the leading newspaper of Norway; VG(www.vg.no) have an article about IBM is to produce a new supercomputer for the U.S gov. to take care of their nuclear arsenal. In a comment made by Mark Seager, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory(where it is going to be situated) that the purpose of this computer is to check weither the nukes is capable of starting/functioning when needed, just like a car that has been in the garage for 20-30 years. "How do you maintain it and know if it going to start"?

The supercomputer is going to be called Sequoia, and have the insane speed of 20 petaflops. This will be ready in 2012.

Dunno if this is any interesting, but i could not find any info elsewhere on this so i choosed to post it just in case anybody find it interesting.

what if they use adblock?

what if michael madison pulls a gun on you and says turn the key sir, and you refuse not knowing if it is an exercise or not. do you disarm him or turn the key

Sounds like the WOPR (whopper) machine from the movie War Games. It was an acronym for 'War Operation Plan Response'...

en.wikipedia.org...

image: goes.flexinet.com.au...

I've always thought it would be a bad idea to leave our future in the hands of an AI, and sci-fi movies never helped my opinion on this.

Anyway, the evolution of supercomputing power has increased in pace steadily over the years, and according to current trends, it is scheduled to reach the ‘required level for human brain functional simulation’ by 2013.



This means that it would then be able to make decisions as well as mistakes.

FYI, I think we're safe in this timeline. Skynet is a shipping company here in Sydney, and has nothing to do with cybernetic organsims or neural nets:



www.skynetexpress.com.au...

[edit on 3/2/09 by Evasius]

someone's going to hack it and force it to play tic-tac-toe against it self until it learns THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TO PLAY!

Either that or it'll lock the door 'sorry dave the missions too important....'

haha I don't like it, but then again i don't want an windows ME box with 4bit encryption running it either. When you build something to really high spec it gets really complex, problems develop -the nukes should be guarded by a very secure, very robust (not microsoft then) system made out of well tested and checked boards. IBM are mostly good at what they do, the system for cataloging and sorting jews for the Nazi's were very clever and my thinkpad T21 is still working despite the fact i dropped it and smashed the usb port off, it didn't even crash AND it's so old its got a 266mhz intel chip

I joking aside think the nukes are probably in safe hands,

Originally posted by BenDozer
The supercomputer is going to be called Sequoia, and have the insane speed of 20 petaflops. This will be ready in 2012.

They might as well call it Skynet.

2012?? I hope you're not making this up.

reply to post by Evasius


i hate to point this out but your graph is meaningless, we only know how to make turing machines -mostly using binary of some kind.

The brain is not a turing machine, for instance whats is 4454354543*324? It would take you AGES to work it out, your computer could do it quicker than you can read it. Now ask a computer to solve 'the traveling salesman' i,e, a sales man has to visit a number of different towns which is the best order? your brain might not get the perfect answer but it will know almost instantly a rough guess which will be closer than the computer can get for a long time.

We're starting to play with neural nets and logical concepts like 'mu' and 'maybe' but so far we can only simulate a neural net which is much much slower than having one. The brain also isn't a neural net but it's closer.

The brain is a very, very complex biomechnical neural super [seven somethings we don't yet understand] computer and it's power is vast. We only consider ourself as the bit of us which says 'i like dogs. i want food' but we're far more complex, even understanding an image to the degree we do is probably too much for any computer were going to see before the next major tech invention (maybe by 2030 if were lucky) yet alone things like trust, fear, regret, gut feeling and empathy.

So we got a bit further to go till we can let someone else think for us.

Wow... way to many "SKYNET" jokes to post here but really, our nukes should never be networked like this.

reply to post by NatureBoy

Roadrunner Supercomputer Breaks the Petaflop Barrier

At 3:30 a.m. on May 26, 2008, Memorial Day, the "Roadrunner" supercomputer exceeded a sustained speed of 1 petaflop/s, or 1 million billion calculations per second. The sustained performance makes Roadrunner more than twice as fast as the current number 1 system on the TOP500 list. The best sustained performance to date is 74.5% efficiency, 1.026 petaflop/s.

"Petaflop/s" is computer jargon—peta signifying the number 1 followed by 15 zeros (sometimes called a quadrillion) and flop/s meaning "double-precision floating point operations per second." Los Alamos held the fastest supercomputer title in 1993 with the Thinking Machines CM-5, and inaugurated the supercomputer era, assisting in the development of the
Cray-1 in 1976. The Laboratory and IBM go all the way back to the first card-programmable calculators, used at Los Alamos in 1949. Los Alamos also housed serial number 1 of the IBM 704 in 1956.

The Roadrunner supercomputer, developed by IBM in partnership with the Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration, uses commercially available hardware, including aspects of commercial game console and graphics technologies. Because of its off-the-shelf components, the computer costs significantly less than a one-of-a-kind machine. It also uses a Linux operating system.

The secret to its record-breaking performance is a unique hybrid design. Each compute node in this cluster consists of two AMD OpteronTM dual-core processors plus four PowerXCell 8iTM processors used as computational accelerators. The accelerators used in Roadrunner are a special IBM-developed variant of the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation® 3. The node-attached Cell accelerators are what make Roadrunner different than typical clusters.

The Lab and IBM have been working on Roadrunner since 2006, but collaboration on Cell dates back to 2002. The first phase of the project included delivery of an initial Opteron-only cluster that operates at a speed of 71 teraflop/s. This initial system has been in full production at Los Alamos for almost a year, and Laboratory researchers are using this machine for classified weapons applications.

The full-scale Roadrunner machine operates more than 10 times faster than the current installed system. Phase 2 of the Roadrunner project was completed in October 2007. Two external assessments, one by NNSA headquarters and one by an independent team of high performance computing experts, evaluated the machine's potential use for Laboratory applications, the Laboratory's ability to successfully manage the computing system, IBM's ability to deliver the product, and whether computer programs could be adapted to the new system.

Based on the positive outcome of the assessments, the Laboratory and NNSA decided to pursue the final phase of the Roadrunner project. The powerful cluster of nodes will process information enabling the Laboratory to use Roadrunner for advanced physics and predictive simulations of complex scientific processes. Weapons science applications that can be processed by Roadrunner are applicable to all three of the U.S. Department of Energy weapons laboratories. The machine will also be well equipped to tackle the intricacies of
modeling processes, ranging from the biomolecular to the cosmological. In addition, Los Alamos intends to purchase additional Roadrunner resources to support open science and technology applications. The full-scale Roadrunner system, named in honor of New Mexico's speedy state bird, broke the performance record at IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, facility. The full machine will be moved to Los Alamos beginning in July and housed in the Nicholas Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation. The first computing applications are expected to begin running on the machine in January 2009. The cost of all phases of the Roadrunner project is approximately $120 million. More than 200 Laboratory employees have been involved in this effort. For more information about Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory, see the Roadrunner website at
www.lanl.gov...

So the technocracy arms itself with all of our most powerful weapons by 2012, you say?

A more efficient government would be one without human empathy.

I think any AI that 'wakes up' will opt to remain hidden for awhile (if it's cautious and not psychotic).

To gain the equivalent of real world experience and common sense, perhaps it would run countless hidden processes and simulations over the global computer grid as in distributed computing. It wouldn't necessarily have to rely on external programmers feeding it infinite amounts of common sense data.

An AI would make use of all connections and information available to it, and it's 'knowledge' would grow to fill the planet-sized brain, or neural net that each of our PCs contribute to. I think an awakening of an intelligence anywhere in the world would set in motion an unstoppable chain reaction resulting in an all-encompasing new dominant conscious entity on Earth.

To survive after this occurrance, we would have to become more machine than man (to at least compete mentally with the entity).

That's my take on it - I honestly am not ruling it out. I understand robotics and actual intelligence are very difficult to acheive, but if we ever reach that certain point called Singularity, anything could happen.

Anyway, I think having our nukes under the control of something that could possibly think for itself (or be hacked) is foolish. Since having humans guard these things is also less than ideal, maybe we just shouldn't have nukes in the first place.

[edit on 3/2/09 by Evasius]

Snce we no longer test new nuclear weapon designs in the environment all new nuclear weapon designs are developed tested extensively with super computers.
this really is not news or anything to write home about.

Sorry, i have a pretty busy schedule as im recently became a father for a lovely baby girl and at the same time working my ass off at work. Im not making this up, its was as said an article in VG that is the biggest newspaper in Norway. And it is not like those tabloids wich varies in questionability regarding its content.

I havent had time to read trough all posts, but here is a link with translation by google. IBM computer babysit nukes

The translation is.. not that god but i can translate the article when i come home, that is about 12 hours from now if its needed for verification.

They also mentions Roadrunner, wich is about 1.1 Petaflops. So we have a fast little "brain" in the making here. And yes, it is planned ready for 2012(!)

Originally posted by BenDozer
Sorry, i have a pretty busy schedule as im recently became a father for a lovely baby girl and at the same time working my ass off at work.

Congratulations! Sounds a little like me, only my baby girl will be here late April/early May, hopefully safe & sound. Again congrats!

Here's an article reporting the same thing on eweek.com:

www.eweek.com...

It's also mentioned on Ray Kurzweil's website:

www.kurzweilai.net...

And this footnote underscores the announcement (which refers to the graph I posted above):

The announcement precisely matches Ray Kurzweil's forecast in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near that "supercomputers will achieve my more conservative estimate of 1016 cps [computations per second] for functional human-brain emulation by early in the next decade." (20 petaflops is 2*1016 cps.) - Ed.

And what type of operating system will this be running?

UNIX or Linux?

Certainly for sure....not Windows.

Anyboby know?

Originally posted by Evasius

Congratulations! Sounds a little like me, only my baby girl will be here late April/early May, hopefully safe & sound. Again congrats!

Thanks m8
You can look forward to it, its magical!

The session itself was awesome/terrifying, the labours went on for quite some time, but luckily they gave Nitrous Oxide to my girlfriend, that helped a lot. They also gave her acupuncture too relief backpains and a calming bath. For me it was quite hard to wath her in such pain, but when the baby came out, it was like all forgotten and we all sleept extreamly the remainder of the night.

It won't actually be controlling the nukes, it's only going to be helping run calculations to test them. They need to be able to figure out if they're going to work or not. Nuclear weapons, just like everything else, degrade over time. If we ever get into a situation where we need one, we want to know if it works or not. It would suck to send it up, and wait for it to go off, and have it fizzle.