alt Hacker NewsWhy would the scientific computing people want to tip their hand? It’s an open secret that the main point of these mammoth FP64 compute machines is to simulate nuclear weapons detonations to comply with the CTBT you’d think that crowd would really not be fans of broadcasting their capabilities.
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It is partly this and partly a funding vehicle for American next-gen computing. It is not that hard to estimate FP64 ballpark from a whole bunch of public statistics. And it takes a looot more than raw FLOPs to get a simulation working. And presumably a looot more to translate it into practice. And the openness makes it easier to talk to different vendors and not get in the way of them having all the H1Bs it takes to get these things to work.
Plus one think I like to say is that if a bullet is flying towards you, you could know everything about the chemistry of the gunpowder and the composition of the alloy without it affecting what happens next.
What for? You only need to match the performance that existed in the 1950s. In the Soviet Union. Everything else is a lack of knowledge rather than computing power.
Also you should read the second sentence of the CTBT Wikipedia article to find out why it's not even in force (spoiler: US hasn't ratified it).
At some point, you will get diminishing returns no? I don't think compute is the bottleneck right now for mechanical engineering if you don't count AI.
In adversarial scenarios, there are varying strategies in communicating one's capabilities, just as one might do in a poker game.
Sometimes you want to show off what you can do to dissuade others from fucking with you. Sometimes you want to undersell your capabilities to hide your true ability. Sometimes you want others to think you are underselling your capabilities when you are actually at a disadvantage.