![]() ![]() It also has a memory capacity of nearly 2 petabytes – or about 2,000,000,000 megabytes. The Trinity supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory occupies over 5,000 square feet and boasts a peak performance of 41.5 petaFLOPS. Complex multi-physics, multi-scale simulations are used to analyze and predict the performance, safety, and reliability of nuclear weapons and to certify their functionality. NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program was established to process massive amounts of data at our National Laboratories and make the stockpile stewardship program possible. Exascale computing is the next frontier for digital might – systems capable of a quintillion (10 18) calculations each second. The fastest supercomputers in the world operate at the petascale – a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 15) calculations each second. This simply means calculations in which the decimal point “floats” depending on the unit. ![]() Storage capacity and processing power have since grown by leaps and bounds, and NNSA has kept pace with the advent of high-performance computing, or supercomputing.Ĭomputing power is now measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Most modern servers allow 25 megabyte files to be sent as a single email attachment. This was cutting-edge technology at the time. ![]() In 1964, the Kansas City National Security Campus installed a brand-new disk drive that could store 95,000 punch cards worth of data, or approximately 7.6 megabytes. population in mere weeks, as opposed to years. This revolutionary system was used in the 1890 census to determine the U.S. When the card is fed into a reader, metal pins pass through the holes in the card and complete a circuit on the other side. Fields within the grid are punched out to represent a specific value. Punch cards are made of thick paper with a grid pattern. Hollerith went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, which is known today as IBM. It efficiently and accurately automated the process of collecting and recording data. Herman Hollerith’s electronic tabulating machine used punch cards and was modeled after an automatic weaving machine. It was 100 years before a clever Census Bureau employee devised a solution. Our forebears attempted to record our young nation’s total population in 1790 – with delayed and faulty results. The first time mass data collection and analysis were truly demanded in the United States was for the census. Though its origins predate NNSA, computing technology is now inexorably linked to the Nuclear Security Enterprise, and the brilliant minds at our National Laboratories will undoubtedly shape its future. Computing power has transformed society – making the impossible routine and epitomizing the proverb, “necessity is the mother of invention.” A capability that simply did not exist when our nation was founded is now so omnipresent that it has impacted every industry, every discipline, and every aspect of our lives. ![]()
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