Free Republic

I was poking around some old data today from some old backups, and I ran across something the old time computer folks will recognize and thought I'd share. Many, many moons ago, before the internet was much more than a few government systems set up to 'talk' to each other, we still had PCs and stuff, believe it or not. Granted, compared to the system you can buy for a few hundred dollars today from just about anywhere on the internet, they weren't much, but they were what we had. There were also things called "magazines" printed on thinly sliced...

U.S. scientists say they have created an automated program designed to "debug" the nation's nuclear test computer simulations. Purdue University researchers, working with scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said their program, called AutomaDeD (pronounced like automated), finds errors in computer code for complex "parallel" programs. Because international treaties forbid the detonation of nuclear test weapons, certification is done using complex simulations. The researchers said such 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. "The simulations take several weeks...