Supercomputers To Aid U.S. Nuclear Management

For the first time, the Department of Energy is making three of the world’s fastest supercomputers available to academic researchers who design complex scientific simulations, in the hope that their work can help maintain the nation’s aging nuclear stockpile in an era of nuclear test bans.

The new Academic Strategic Alliance Program (ASAP), announced Thursday, also will provide $250 million over 10 years to fund computer-modeling research centers at the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Utah and the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign.

University researchers will be granted about 10 percent of the run time on current and next-generation supercomputers at DOE’s Sandia, Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories. Those machines, previously devoted exclusively to national security, can perform trillions of calculations per second.

Armed with “previously unimagined levels of computing power,” the project will generate new ideas that DOE can use to develop techniques for testing existing bombs without actually blowing them up, Energy Secretary Federico Pena said Thursday.

“We’re going to meet (that) challenge through computer simulations that verify the safety, reliability and performance of our nuclear weapons stockpile,” he said.

The university centers will not do classified research. Each will work on a separate topic that happens to be related to weapons issues. For example, at the University of Chicago center, which will emphasize astrophysics, scientists are hoping to “finally understand in quantitative detail how massive stars explode,” said David Schramm, noted astrophysicist.

Like bombs, stars use thermonuclear reactions. And in space, Schramm noted, “testing continues to go on.”

Caltech’s center will concentrate on shock-wave phenomena, and Stanford’s will study fluid dynamics and turbulence, especially in jet engines. Utah will focus on models of accidental fires and explosions, and Illinois will establish a center for rocket simulation.

Finding a convincing way to verify weapons conditions through software simulation is something that has never been done before, said Victor H. Reis, DOE assistant secretary for defense programs. Although the core of the plan is intended to enhance what DOE calls “science-based stockpile stewardship,” Pena said it will also speed understanding of “some of our most difficult national challenges.”