[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 23]
[Senate]
[Pages 31963-31964]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          ROADRUNNER COMPUTER

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, today's Washington Post Science section 
contains an excellent summary on the work America is doing to develop 
the fastest computers in the world and the benefits to all of us from 
such computers.
  The headline on the story, ``Faster Computers Accelerate Pace of 
Discovery,'' captures today and hints at tomorrow for science, using 
computers that have processing speeds of more than a thousand trillion 
calculations per second. That speed is known as a petaflop, in computer 
science speak.
  I am proud that the first petaflop computer in the world is likely to 
be at Los Alamos National Laboratory in my home State of New Mexico. 
Working in conjunction with IBM, LANL's ``Roadrunner'' computer holds 
out the promise of immense advances in almost every aspect of 
scientific inquiry.
  In the area of nuclear weapons, for example, computing power 
increases are critical. Two decades ago, this Nation decided to stop 
underground testing of nuclear weapons. Yet the necessity of certifying 
the reliability and performance of our nuclear stockpile remains. How 
could we do away with underground testing and still have the three 
weapons lab directors certify to the President that our weapons were 
safe and reliable. We decided to adopt a program called Science-Based 
Stockpile Stewardship. Essentially, we decided to simulate a nuclear 
weapons explosion using computer power. Clearly, America needed more 
computing power when we made this decision. ``Roadrunner'' is an 
important step toward making sure that our nuclear stockpile will work 
if ever needed.
  One of the most interesting uses of this enormous computer power is 
modeling climate change. It is ironic that many of those who oppose 
additional funding for the national laboratories want a more aggressive 
stance on the question of climate change and ways to ameliorate it, are 
the same people who support a House-passed Energy and Water 
Appropriations bill that would reject more funding for ``Roadrunner.''
  Mr. President, we are in the middle of negotiations on the Energy and 
Water appropriations bill right now. Adoption of the House-passed bill 
will not only set back our work on computing power and climate change 
but will be a disaster for certification of the reliability of our 
nuclear weapons. I hope that all Members of Congress will read today's 
article in the Washington Post to get an idea of what is at stake as we 
set policy in the future.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the entire article be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2007]

             Faster Computers Accelerate Pace of Discovery

                          (By Christopher Lee)

       Sometime next year, developers will boot up the next 
     generation of supercomputers, machines whose vast increases 
     in processing power will accelerate the transformation of the 
     scientific method, experts say.
       The first ``petascale'' supercomputer will be capable of 
     1,000 trillion calculations per second. That's about twice as 
     powerful as today's dominant model, a basketball-court-size 
     beast known as BlueGene/L, at the Energy Department's 
     Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that 
     performs a peak of 596 trillion calculations per second.
       The computing muscle of the new petascale machines will be 
     akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined, 
     experts say. A computation that would take a lifetime for a 
     home PC and that can be completed in about five hours on 
     today's supercomputers will be doable in as little as two 
     hours.
       ``The difficulty in building the machines is tremendous, 
     and the amount of power these machines require is pretty 
     mind-boggling,'' said Mark Seager, assistant department head 
     for advanced computing technology at Lawrence Livermore. 
     ``But the scientific results that we can get out of them are 
     also mind-boggling and worth every penny and every megawatt 
     it takes to build them.''
       A leading candidate to become the first petascale machine, 
     the ``Roadrunner'' supercomputer being developed by IBM in 
     partnership with the Energy Department's Los Alamos National 
     Laboratory, will require about 4 megawatts of power--enough 
     to illuminate 10,000 light bulbs, said John Hopson, program 
     director for advanced simulation and computing at Los Alamos 
     in New Mexico.
       But scientists say Roadrunner and its cousins will make 
     possible dramatically improved computer simulations. That 
     will help shed new light on subjects such as climate change, 
     geology, new drug development, dark matter and other secrets 
     of the universe, as well as other fields in which direct 
     experimental observation is time-consuming, costly, dangerous 
     or impossible.
       In fact, supercomputers and their simulations are becoming 
     so powerful that they essentially have introduced a new step 
     in the time-honored scientific method that moves from theory 
     to hypothesis to experimental confirmation, some experts 
     contend.
       ``They are a tool that really helps stimulate the 
     imagination of scientists and engineers in ways that 
     previously weren't possible,'' said David Turek, vice 
     president of supercomputing at IBM. ``You had theory and 
     hypothesis and experimentation. Well, now scientists are 
     admitting that computation is an important part of this, as 
     well.''
       ``Nature is the final arbiter of truth,'' said Seager, the 
     Lawrence Livermore computer scientist, but ``rather than 
     doing experiments, a lot of times now we're actually 
     simulating those experiments and getting the data that way.
       ``We can now do as much scientific discovery with 
     computational science as we could do before with 
     observational science or theoretical science.''

[[Page 31964]]

       A particularly fruitful area of computer modeling has been 
     the study of global climate change. Ten years ago, experts 
     agreed that humans probably were contributing to global 
     warming. Now, in part because of a 10,000-fold increase 
     computing power and better accuracy in climate simulations, 
     scientists are sure of it.
       One result is that computer climate models can now simulate 
     atmospheric and oceanic conditions and, crucially, how 
     changes in each affect the other, experts said. Now the worry 
     is not that computing power is inadequate but that the aging 
     of NASA's weather satellites will lead to a shortage of input 
     data before long, Seager and others said.
       Petascale computers also will make it possible to predict, 
     say, the effect of an earthquake on every building in 
     downtown Los Angeles, experts said. Current models cannot 
     yield predictions for areas smaller than a square mile or 
     two. The increased detail could help shape building codes and 
     be a valuable tool in evacuation planning and disaster 
     preparedness.
       Computer simulations also help assess the reliability, 
     safety, security and performance of weapons in the U.S. 
     nuclear stockpile, years removed from any real-life nuclear 
     tests. ``Nuclear weapons are the quintessential example of 
     something you can't really test anymore, so a lot of it has 
     to be done computationally,'' said Hopson, the Los Alamos 
     scientist.
       Other potential uses of petascale computers include better 
     simulations of what happens when stars explode into 
     supernovas and die, and new and more refined analyses of 
     experimental drugs and their effects on disease and 
     interactions with other medications, experts said.
       Still another is the modeling of the bird flu virus and how 
     it might evolve to become more communicable and lethal--
     knowledge that could help scientists develop a vaccine in 
     time to use it and to inform public health planning. 
     Petascale computers are also expected to lead to more potent 
     models for Wall Street to calculate risk and predict the fate 
     of financial instruments, as well as more advanced digital 
     prototypes of automobiles and jet aircraft, further reducing 
     the need for physical mock-ups.
       The remarkable advances in computing power of recent 
     decades are frequently attributed to the tenet known as 
     Moore's Law, named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, 
     which says that progress in building chips doubles the power 
     of microprocessors about every 18 months. But that alone does 
     not explain the leaps in supercomputing, scientists said.
       Today's supercomputers rely not only on better ``compute 
     nodes'' (made up of faster chips and more memory), but also 
     on scientists' ability to ``gang'' hundreds of thousands of 
     those nodes together in a single machine and to devise better 
     ways of having them communicate with one another and divide 
     up the work of complex problem solving.
       ``If you ran today's code on yesterday's computers, they 
     would be much faster,'' said Raymond Bair, director of the 
     Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at the Energy 
     Department's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. 
     ``People have figured out how to solve the problems faster.''
       Even before a petascale computer is a reality, scientists 
     are anticipating the next big milestone, the exascale 
     machine--a thousand times more powerful still, and capable of 
     1 million trillion calculations per second. But they'll have 
     to wait. That one isn't expected until about 2018.

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