World’s fastest supercomputer ‘El Capitan’ goes online — it will be used to secure the US nuclear stockpile and in other classified research | Live Science

January 22, 2025January 21, 2025 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The fastest supercomputer in the world has officially launched at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNNL) in California.

The supercomputer, called “El Capitan,” cost $600 million to build and will handle various sensitive and classified tasks including securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons in the absence of underground testing, according to LNNL representatives. This was prohibited in 1992.

Research will primarily be focused on national security, including material discovery, high-energy-density physics, nuclear data and weapon design, as well as other classified tasks.

Construction on the machine began in May 2023, and it came online in November 2024, before being officially dedicated on Jan. 9.

Pentagon’s New Factory: Your DNA | Wired.com

April 10, 2012January 22, 2015 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

The fields of bioengineering and synthetic biology have already produced some useful, scary and flat-out bizarre entities. Besides renewable petroleum or steel strong spider silk, there are all sorts of potential therapeutic, industrial and agricultural purposes for reorganized DNA.

But DARPA thinks progress is too slow. Previous projects (it calls them “primitive”) are ad hoc and labor intensive, chugging along by trial and error in secretive silos. Hence we are “limited to producing only a small fraction of the vast number of possible chemicals, materials and living systems that would be enabled by the ability to truly engineer biology.”

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