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Supercomputing the Cosmos

Blue Mountain, the world's fastest computer, with the world's most
powerful advanced graphics system was unveiled by The U.S. Department
of Energy (DOE) and Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). The machine is
located at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Blue Mountain is the latest
advancement in the Energy Department's stockpile stewardship program
which uses science-based methods to assess and certify the safety,
security and reliability of nuclear weapons without underground
nuclear testing. Blue Mountain ran Linpack, one of the computer
industry's standard speed tests for big computers, at a fast 1.6
trillion operations per second (teraOps), giving it a claim to the
coveted top spot on the TOP500 list.

The Department of Energy is developing five generations of
high-performance computers as a part of its stockpile stewardship
program with a goal of reaching 100 teraOps by 2004. Blue Mountain is
the second of two DOE computers built with a peak speed of at least 3
teraOps. The first, Pacific Blue -- developed by IBM is located at
DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Plasma science is rich in distinguishable scales ranging from the
atomic to the galactic to the meta-galactic, i.e., the {\it
mesoscale}. Thus plasma science has an important contribution to make
in understanding the connection between microscopic and macroscopic
phenomena. Plasma is a system composed of a large number of particles
which interact primarily, but not exclusively, through the
electromagnetic field. The problem of understanding the linkages and
couplings in multi-scale processes is a frontier problem of modern
science involving fields as diverse as plasma phenomena in the
laboratory to galactic dynamics.

Unlike the first three states of matter, plasma involves the mesoscale
and its interdisciplinary founding have drawn upon various subfields
of physics including engineering, astronomy, and chemistry. Basic
plasma research is now posed to provide, with major developments in
instrumentation and large-scale computational resources, fundamental
insights into the properties of matter on scales ranging from the
atomic to the galactic. In all cases, these are treated as mesoscale
systems. Thus, basic plasma research, when applied to the study of
astrophysical and space plasmas, recognizes that the behavior of the
near-earth plasma environment may depend to some extent on the
behavior of the stellar plasma, that may in turn be governed by
galactic plasmas. However, unlike laboratory plasmas, astrophysical
plasmas will forever be inaccessible to in situ observation. The
inability to test concepts and theories of large-scale plasmas leaves
only virtual testing as a means to understand the universe. Advances
in in computer technology and the capability of performing physics
first principles, fully three-dimensional, particle--in--cell
simulations, on peta-flop computer frames are making virtual testing a
viable alternative to verify our predictions about the far universe.