[dr_who]

Yes, but is clustering adequate for doing nuclear bomb simulations? It's my understanding that clustering can't handle all of the kinds of problems you normally use a supercomputer for.

[staytrue]

I think we designed our bombs using computers about as powerful as an old pentium II. I think we built our first bombs without any computers at all. I doubt the chinese need supercomputers for bomb testing.

[LarryLied]

Yes, but is clustering adequate for doing nuclear bomb simulations?

We do our simulations on a cluster. Lawrence Livermore's ASCI White, the fastest computer in the world, consists of 8,192 commercially available RS/6000 processors. Runs at 12.3 teraflops. That means it does 1,230 calculations in the time the computers Bush is allowing to be exported do 19.