Comment by mlyle
2 hours ago
> Because you need those calculations to "pump" nuclear weapons. They are needed to calculate both the geometry to make fusion bombs possible at all and to calculate the effect of a given geometry. They are the reason US/Russia/China have the biggest and strongest weapons known to humanity.
We have a couple new nuclear weapon designs, but not really going for bigger or stronger. Just packaging.
We built the big powerful ones with 1960s computing.
Now, stockpile stewardship -- being sure that stuff will keep working without ongoing testing -- is a bit expensive in compute. You need early 2010s supercomputer power.
In other words, I strongly disagree that nuclear weapons are the primary driver of high-end compute.
High end compute also existed in the 60’s.
The military has already mastered fusion (power), and likely has mastered gravity in some form in secret. They aren’t using mainstream compute for these discoveries
> High end compute also existed in the 60’s.
Believe me, I know-- my dad did some work on the 360/44 and other large systems.
High end late 1960s compute -- of the sort used to go to the moon or to design big nuclear weapons -- was roughly 486DX4-100 class. Not individual computers; the total computing at DOE or NASA. Of course, it would be hard to replace either with a single 486 because of availability, usage at different geographic locations, etc.
You can assume a single large AMD Threadripper machine ($25k?) outclasses late-1960s DoE by roughly a factor of 50,000. And that assumes you didn't bother to put a GPU in it.
> The military has already mastered fusion (power), and likely has mastered gravity in some form in secret. They aren’t using mainstream compute for these discoveries
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