The nation's fastest "unclassified" supercomputer will power up to full strength today in Richland to tackle some of the toughest problems in biology and the environment.
"There's that stuff in the ground at the Hanford site, to begin with," said Scott Studham, manager of computing at the computer's home at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The new 11.8-teraflop supercomputer, fifth-fastest in the world if you include the classified supercomputers, can handle any of the typical tasks of these digital behemoths, from climate modeling to precise simulations of complex behavior at the subatomic level.
A teraflop is a "trillion floating point operations per second" -- like doing a trillion addition equations per second.
Studham said the new computer was specially designed to use its number-crunching and analytical powers to perform tasks of value to the region. Managing the aged underground tanks of mixed radioactive waste left from the Energy Department's bomb works at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which threaten to contaminate the groundwater, is one such job.
"We need to understand the sub-surface flow at Hanford and do a full (computer) model of it over many years," Studham said. But managing Hanford's toxic legacy and protecting the local environment is only one focus of the new supercomputer.
"It's also tailored for bioinformatics and computational biology," he said. With the recently completed sequencing of the entire human genetic code, or genome, biologists need powerful computers to work with all of the 3 billion bits of DNA.
The Richland lab's supercomputer, located inside the William R. Riley Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory, will be available to the public through a scientific-proposal process.
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