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QuentinUK t1_iwgdsbh wrote

Reply to comment by damattdanman in AMD Now Powers 101 of the World's Fastest Supercomputers by Avieshek

Oak Ridge National Laboratory: materials, nuclear science, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security.

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damattdanman t1_iwgegbh wrote

I get the rest. But national security?

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nuclear_splines t1_iwgik6l wrote

Goes with the rest - precise simulations of nuclear material are often highly classified. Sometimes also things like “simulating the spread of a bio weapon attack, using AT&Ts cell tower data to get high precision info about population density across an entire city.”

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Ok-disaster2022 t1_iwiccqm wrote

Well there's numerous nuclear modeling codes, but one of the biggest most validated is MCNP. The team in charge of it has accepted bug fix reports from researchers around the world regardless if they're allowed to have access to the files and data or not, export control be damned. Hell the most important part is the cross section libraries (which cut out above 2 MeV) and you can access those on public website.

I'm sure there's top secret codes, but it costs millions to build and validate codes and keep them up to date, but there's not profit in nuclear. Aerospace the modeling software is proprietary but that's because it's how those companies make billion dollar airplane deals.

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nuclear_splines t1_iwid0jw wrote

Yeah, I wasn’t thinking of the code being proprietary, but the data. One of my friends is a nuclear engineer, and as an undergraduate student she had to pass a background check before the DoE would mail her a DVD containing high-accuracy data on measurements of nuclear material, because that’s not shared publicly. Not my background, so I don’t know precisely what the measurements were, but I imagine data on weapons grade materials is protected more thoroughly than the reactor tech she was working with.

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