Oil crisis stalled cars, but jumpstarted a supercomputing revolution
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The CTR Standing Committee, an advisory group for the fusion program, recommended an independent review of the size and scope of computational activity in CTR. The Ad Hoc Panel on the Application of Computers to Controlled Thermonuclear Research, led by Bennett Miller of the AEC was formed in May 1973, and delivered its report, Application of Computers to Controlled Thermonuclear Research in July of that same year.
An advisory panel said large computers were needed to analyze the properties of magnetically confined plasmas and to simulate the characteristics of fusion reactors. The panel concluded that CTR would need to immediately scale up to two of the most powerful computers in the world – a Control Data Corporation (CDC) 7600, an IBM 360/195 or a Texas Instruments ASC – all of which had about 10 megaflops of compute power. (A megaflops is one million calculations per second.)
The report would lead to the creation of the National CTR Computer Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. However, before that could happen, Trivelpiece had a lot of political work to do to convince his colleagues such a center was needed.
What Trivelpiece proposed was locating a powerful computer at one lab and connecting other labs through a telecommunications link.
“Experts in the fusion computing business told me that such as scheme wouldn’t work, but it’s likely that they wanted their own computer at their institution and were worried this approach would reduce research dollars,” he adds.
“At the time, the idea of doing this was pretty foreign,” he says. The total of all computer power available to CTR was the equivalent of one CDC 6600 – a computer with about one megabyte of memory and a peak performance of less than one megaflops. To put that into perspective, all contemporary personal computers perform in the tens or hundreds of megaflops; and they regularly contain at least a gigabyte of memory – more than 15,000 times that of the CDC 6600.
“The minimum needed was the equivalent power of about two CDCs,” Trivelpiece says.
Based on his own experience as an experimental physicist, Trivelpiece concluded “It was impossible to compare two experiments because (the researchers) were all using different codes,” or computer programs, he says. “We needed one transparent code that everyone could work on.”
The fusion community also needed “unfettered access to the largest high-performance computers,” he adds.
