Gordon Bell finalist team pushes scale of rocket simulation on El Capitan

27 pointsposted 2 months ago
by perihelions

6 Comments

thrwaway55

2 months ago

Anyone else get confused on this thinking it was a legacy OSX version. The title should include super computer to clarify.As one interpretation implies some code golf.

explodes

2 months ago

> Researchers used Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s exascale supercomputer El Capitan to perform the largest fluid dynamics simulation ever

ISL

2 months ago

That is known to the public.

srvmshr

2 months ago

True. Applications as these go back a few decades. From the news buzz when it was launched, ASCI White was similarly used in early '00s to understand nuclear explosions and shockwave propagation (instead of relying on live tests) - classic CFD problems[1] Successor supercomputer clusters were also used to do weapon design & nuclear physics simulations. One supercomputer IIRC even simulated a tornado genesis.[2]

I can only imagine the classified applications must have grown ten-fold in complexity in the interim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White

[2] https://news.wisc.edu/a-scientist-and-a-supercomputer-re-cre...

pwarner

2 months ago

Yeah I was thinking they probably picked a public use case that looks a lot like their classified workloads... The article mentions the simulation ran quickly, the time spent was debugging. Suggests to me the real classified system will be much more capable.