Communications of the ACM
New Automated Tool 'debugs' Nuclear Weapon Simulations
Purdue University researchers, working with high-performance computing experts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have created an automated program to "debug" simulations used to more efficiently certify the nation's nuclear weapons.
The program, called AutomaDeD (pronounced like automated), finds errors in computer code for complex "parallel" programs.
"The simulations take several weeks to run, and then they have to be debugged to correct errors in the code," said Saurabh Bagchi, an associate professor in Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "The error might have occurred in the first hour of operation, and if you had known about it you could have stopped it then."
Because international treaties forbid the detonation of nuclear test weapons, certification is done using complex simulations. The simulations, which may contain as many as 100,000 lines of computer code, must accurately show reactions taking place on the scale of milliseconds, or thousandths of a second.
From Purdue University News Service
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