Los Alamos National Labs – Doesn't Fit In

March 31, 2013

Los Alamos Lab's Roadrunner Supercomputer To Be Shut Down

The fastest supercomputer in the world in 2009 will be shutdown today, according to the Los Alamos National Labs.

Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier—one million billion calculations per second—will be decommissioned on Sunday, March 31.

Roadrunner’s design was unique, and controversial. It combined two different kinds of processors, making it a “hybrid.” It had 6,563 dual-core general-purpose processors (AMD Opterons™), with each core linked to a special graphics processor (PowerXCell 8i) called a “Cell.” The Cell was an enhanced version of a specialized processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3®, adapted specifically to support scientific computing.

Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable. Future supercomputers will also need new solutions for handling and storing the vast amounts of data involved in such massive calculations.

February 13, 2009

Ed Grothus Of The Black Hole Died Today

Ed Grothus, proprietor of the os Alamos Sales Company most commonly known as The Black Hole has died today.

Ed Grothus worked at Los Alamos National Labs building nuclear bombs, quitting that job and becoming a anit-nucelar activist and then founding the The Black Hole. The Black Hole is a store which has military surplus and salvage equipment from the Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico. The Black Hole web site says they are a recycler of nuclear waste. The Black Hole is famous for providing movie props and materials for artists.

Ed was the subject of three documentaries: Atomic Ed & The Black Hole, Los Alamos und die Erben Der Bombe and Laboratory Conditions. He also received various awards.

There is a video on YouTube entitled The Black Hole in which Ed tells his story.

July 23, 2004

LANL Getting Their Act Together, Hopefully (updated)

Los Alamos National Labs was where they invented the first nuke, then send it down south to test. LANL is located kind of between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, near the Jemez mountians. There’s a route from Albuquerque through the Jemez that take you to Los Alamos. Along the road you see abandon cement outposts with “Tech Sector” or something written on them. Back in the day there use to be armed patrols guarding this area in the mountains.

Back in the day they were more concerned about security. Now adays they are being critized for insuffiecnt security, with all this loosing hard drives and floppy disks with classified information and such. Now it looks like heads are going to roll. Last week, “I don’t care how many people I have to fire” in order to knock the security- and safety-challenged staff into line, Los Alamos chief G. Peter (“Pete”) Nanos declared in the Friday memorandum to his 12,000 employees.” and today, ” Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham today ordered a halt to all Department of Energy operations that use the same kind of computer disks reported missing last week at Los Alamos National Laboratory.” I think some people at the labs thing they “were to important to be fired” or “people focusing and making a big deal about stupid, meaningless things instead of doing their jobs: protecting information and national security.” Clearly they have forgot what’s important.

There as been talk before about reducing the number of national labs in this country. Los Alamos is a company town, and things like this will just make congress want to “make it go away”.

[Updated 07/26/04:] Check out this, “The owner of a Los Alamos business, where the FBI seized several items, says the items are an elaborate jest. The owner of the Black Hole Surplus Store and Museum, Ed Grothus, says the items included a small computer hard drive, a cassette tape and some tape labels. He says he had word ?secret? printed on the labels and he placed the labels on the cassette tape and the hard drive.”