Wednesday, November 11, 1998
Community Briefs
Lab scientists create fast supercomputer
A team of scientists from two national laboratories reached a
supercomputing milestone this weekend, getting their simulation of
metallic magnetism to run at 1.002 Teraflops  more than 1
trillion calculations per second.
The achievement, reached using a 1,480-processor Cray T3E
supercomputer at the manufacturer’s facility in Minnesota, caps an
already remarkable scaling up of the code to run on increasingly
powerful massively parallel supercomputers.
Over the summer, the team of scientists at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory working with the National Energy Research Scientific
Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory performed a 1,024-atom first-principles simulation of
metallic magnetism in iron which ran at 657 Gigaflops (billions of
calculations per second) on a 1024-processor Cray/SGI T3E
supercomputer.
Helpline available for teen smokers
Teens who smoke but want to quit can now receive help from the
California Smokers’ Helpline, a free, statewide, telephone-based
tobacco cessation program developed by researchers at the
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Cancer Center and funded
through the California Department of Health Services.
The Helpline teen service, designed for 14- to 17-year-old
tobacco users, offers several options to help with quitting,
including counseling in English or Spanish by cessation counselors,
motivational self-help materials and referrals to local cessation
resources.
"The teen service is based on our success with the adult
California Smokers’ Helpline. We developed this program because
teen smoking is on the rise, and few cessation programs are
designed to meet this age group’s developmental needs for a
successful quit," said Sharon Cummings, research coordinator for
the helpline.
Cummings also noted that much of the work with teen smoking to
date has been aimed at preventing teens from starting. Many
adolescents, however, have already become daily smokers, and to
successfully quit they need support tailored to their age.
Nuclear material
recovery underway
A technology demonstration for separating the plutonium
components from surplus nuclear weapons received a green light from
the Department of Energy last week and is now underway at Los
Alamos National Laboratory.
Two pits, the plutonium components at the heart of nuclear
weapons, were taken apart during the first activity in the
demonstration.
The ARIES Demonstration Line  Advanced Recovery and
Integrated Extraction System  integrates the technologies
needed to remove plutonium from the cores of surplus nuclear
weapons and convert the plutonium into an unclassified form for
international inspection. The plutonium is packaged for long-term
storage and disposition.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who dedicated the ARIES
facility in September, said, "This is a significant step that, when
completed, will provide the United States with the means to assure
that surplus plutonium is never again used to make nuclear
weapons."
"This demonstration is the culmination of several years of work
by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, our sister lab," said Randy
Erickson, program manager for nuclear materials management.
"We designed and installed the equipment, developed all the
operating protocol and safety procedures and now are in a position
to get the key data needed to design a full-scale facility for
conversion of plutonium from pits to an unclassified form for
disposition."
Compiled from Daily Bruin staff reports.
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