“The Death Star” event that ejected life into the solar system
Asteroid impact model. LANL image.
A few years ago, reports Douglas Preston in The Day the Dinosaurs Died, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact, creating a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event:
“Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. (Full story)
NASA concept for generating power in deep space a little KRUSTY
Photo from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
NASA and NNSA engineers lower the wall of the vacuum chamber around the Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY (KRUSTY). The vacuum chamber is later evacuated to simulate the conditions of space when KRUSTY operates.
Prospects of establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon have taken a step forward with the test of a system known as Kilopower, a lightweight fission reactor which could provide ten kilowatts of power for at least a decade.
KRUSTY was developed by NNSA’s [Los Alamos National Laboratory]. Last week, the team won a Gears of Government President’s Award for their achievement. (Full story)
Simulating ice at the bottom of the world: Modeling the Antarctic ice sheets
Antarctic surface velocities simulated by MALI. LANL image.
The collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in the West Antarctic Peninsula shattered more than ice — it shattered scientists’ prevailing view of ice sheets and their floating shelves. Simulating these erratic and complex changes requires scientists to have a high level of detail — called resolution — in their models.
MALI — a collaboration between DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories — puts resolution only where it’s needed. It can focus high resolution on fast-moving ice streams and low resolution in the slow-moving interior. The model changes the resolution by changing the shape and size of the blocks it splits the world into.
Results have been good so far. At a test of one-kilometer (0.6-mile) resolution, MALI simulated the thickness of certain ice accurately down to the meter. Other tests have showed that it’s correctly mimicking under different circumstances how the grounding line moves. (Full story)
Petaflop systems now dominate the supercomputer landscape
Trinity supercomputer at Los Alamos, LANL photo.
Petaflop capabilities now dominate the supercomputer landscape with all of this year's entries in the TOP500 now delivering these levels of performance or more.
In seventh place Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories' Trinity at 20.2 petaflops.
The TOP500 project is a bi-annual report on supercomputers around the world based on the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. For the first time since its inception in 1993, only petaflop systems have made the TOP500 computers list. (Full story)
