Technology brought us the curse of nuclear weapons, but it also might solve the current debate about nuclear weapons testing ‹ without the fallout.

Intel Corp. and the U.S. Department of Energy said Thursday they will build the world's most powerful supercomputer, which they claim will do simulations so well that it will eliminate the need to explode nuclear weapons for testing purposes. The federal agency gave Intel a $46 million contract to develop a supercomputer that uses 9,000 of Intel's newest and fastest microprocessors, code named the P6. Each microprocessor by itself could run a computer workstation; combined in a super computer, the-company says it will be more powerful than all of the world's 50,000 mainframe computers put together.

The agency will put the machine to work on one of the biggest computational problems of all time: ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.

The problem of nuclear testing is a hot political issue, as evidenced by the firestorm of criticism against France for its decision to renew nuclear weapons testing. Nuclear powers have argued they have to test the weapons to make sure they will work right.

Testing obsolescence

But the Intel supercomputer and U.S. Department of Energy software may be able to re-create tests so accurately that they may eliminate the need for them with in a decade, said Ed Barsis, director of a computer division at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where the computer will reside.

"I believe this will be the world's fastest computer," he said.

Other applications that could be solved similarly using this type of computer are various weapons simulations, weather forecasting, analysis of spy satellite photos and oil exploration. This teraflops supercomputer (so named because it will be able to do more than 1 trillion math-intensive operations per second) will be delivered to the DOE late next year. Intel beat out rivals IBM, Cray Research, Mako and Ncube with its proposal for a machine that is up to 10 times faster than the previous 3,600-micro processor Intel machine Sandia now uses.

The earlier Sandia-Intel Paragon machine holds the world's supercomputing record of 281 billion operations per second. Sandia already has used that machine to show that an accident involving an exploding rocket motor would not cause a Trident missile to detonate.

Compared to Moon Mission

The new machine will take up about 1,500 square feet, or as much as a mid-sized home, and it should be able to do more than 1,800 billion operations per second. Development of such a machine is akin to the technological accomplishment of putting a man on the moon, said Gil Weigand, a DOE official. "In the time it takes to blink an eye, it will compute over 40 billion calculations," said Ed Masi, general manager of Intel's super computer business in Portland, Ore.. Even so, it could take tens or hundreds of hours for the supercomputer to run all the variant simulations that would be part of a reliability test for a particular kind of nuclear weapon, Barsis said. It isn't clear whether simulations of nuclear tests could calm the political debate. The agency must create the complex software to do the simulations, and it isn't likely that government would allow the machines to be exported to other nuclear powers. One danger is that it could enable other powers to create new nuclear arsenals; another is that people may simply refuse to believe the simulations are reliable.

Parallel functions

The DOE contract represents a rare victory for a type of computing known as parallel supercomputing, which distributes a problem in pieces to a large number of processors that solve it bit by bit, or in "parallel" functions. This approach works right if the problem can be divvied up that way, but it hasn't worked as well as predicted in the early 1980s, said Chris Willard, supercomputing analyst at research firm International Data Corp. in Mountain View.

Intel specializes in parallel supercomputers, which allows the Santa Clara-based company to sell many of its microprocessors at once. The P6 component is the successor to its immensely popular Pentium microprocessor for personal computers.

When President Clinton decided to end all nuclear testing in the United States, the parallel super computing solution got a new life. On Thursday, he said in a statement, "I am assured . . . that we can meet the challenge of main taining our nuclear deterrent through a science-based stockpile stewardship plan without nuclear testing.