Computational verifiability and feasibility of the ASCI program

The Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative aims to replace physical nuclear weapons testing with computer simulations. This focuses much needed attention on an issue common to all Grand Challenge computation programs: how do you get confidence, as opposed to mere guidance or suggestion, out of a computer simulation? Making the simulation of some physical phenomena rigorous and immune to the usual discretization and rounding errors is computationally expensive and practised by a vanishing, small fraction of the HPCC community. Some of ASCIs proposed computing power should be placed not into brute force increases in particle counts, mesh densities, or finer time steps, but into methods that increase confidence in the answers it produces. This will place the debate over ASCI´s validity on scientific instead of political grounds