The IBM 7030 , also known as Stretch , was IBM 's first transistorized supercomputer . It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964.
89-672: Originally designed to meet a requirement formulated by Edward Teller at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , the first example was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961, and a second customized version, the IBM 7950 Harvest , to the National Security Agency in 1962. The Stretch at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston , England was heavily used by researchers there and at AERE Harwell , but only after
178-435: A computer program , a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. The term benchmark is also commonly utilized for the purposes of elaborately designed benchmarking programs themselves. Benchmarking is usually associated with assessing performance characteristics of computer hardware , for example,
267-413: A superscalar CPU, a VLIW CPU, or a reconfigurable computing CPU — typically have slower clock rates than a sequential CPU with one or two execution units when built from transistors that are just as fast. Nevertheless, CPUs with many execution units often complete real-world and benchmark tasks in less time than the supposedly faster high-clock-rate CPU. Given the large number of benchmarks available,
356-488: A "white lie" in the 1955 article in order to "soothe ruffled feelings", and claimed full credit for the invention. Teller was known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically infeasible (the classic "Super" was one such project.) About his work on the hydrogen bomb, Bethe said: Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not available at Los Alamos. But he
445-593: A benchmark extracts the key algorithms of an application, it will contain the performance-sensitive aspects of that application. Running this much smaller snippet on a cycle-accurate simulator can give clues on how to improve performance. Prior to 2000, computer and microprocessor architects used SPEC to do this, although SPEC's Unix-based benchmarks were quite lengthy and thus unwieldy to use intact. Computer manufacturers are known to configure their systems to give unrealistically high performance on benchmark tests that are not replicated in real usage. For instance, during
534-614: A fusion weapon even though it had been put on a low priority during the war (as the creation of a fission weapon proved to be difficult enough). On a visit to New York, he asked Maria Goeppert-Mayer to carry out calculations on the Super for him. She confirmed Teller's own results: the Super was not going to work. A special group was established under Teller in March 1944 to investigate the mathematics of an implosion-type nuclear weapon . It too ran into difficulties. Because of his interest in
623-699: A hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs also participated in this conference, and transmitted this information to Moscow. With John von Neumann , he contributed an idea of using implosion to ignite the Super. The model of Teller's "classical Super" was so uncertain that Oppenheimer would later say that he wished the Russians were building their own hydrogen bomb based on that design, so that it would almost certainly delay their progress on it. By 1949, Soviet-backed governments had already begun seizing control throughout Eastern Europe , forming such puppet states as
712-408: A manufacturer can usually find at least one benchmark that shows its system will outperform another system; the other systems can be shown to excel with a different benchmark. Manufacturers commonly report only those benchmarks (or aspects of benchmarks) that show their products in the best light. They also have been known to mis-represent the significance of benchmarks, again to show their products in
801-725: A paper that is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics and the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature in Bayesian statistics . Teller was an early member of the Manhattan Project , which developed the first atomic bomb . He made a serious push to develop the first fusion -based weapons, but ultimately fusion bombs only appeared after World War II . He co-founded
890-489: A practical megaton-range H-bomb. The exact contribution provided respectively from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller–Ulam design is not definitively known in the public domain, and the exact contributions of each and how the final idea was arrived upon has been a point of dispute in both public and classified discussions since the early 1950s. In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told
979-415: A processor with a slower clock frequency might perform as well as or even better than a processor operating at a higher frequency. See BogoMips and the megahertz myth . Benchmarks are designed to mimic a particular type of workload on a component or system. Synthetic benchmarks do this by specially created programs that impose the workload on the component. Application benchmarks run real-world programs on
SECTION 10
#17327661414471068-536: A strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. In his later years, he advocated controversial technological solutions to military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using a thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot , and Ronald Reagan 's Strategic Defense Initiative . Teller was a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award and
1157-492: A student in Munich , while riding a streetcar to catch a train for a hike in the nearby Alps , he jumped off the car while it was still moving. He fell, and the wheel nearly severed his right foot. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp, and on occasion he wore a prosthetic foot. The painkillers he was taking were interfering with his thinking, so he decided to stop taking them, instead using his willpower to deal with
1246-533: A system would cost roughly $ 2.5 million and would run at one to two MIPS . Delivery was to be two to three years after the contract was signed. At IBM, a small team at Poughkeepsie including John Griffith and Gene Amdahl worked on the design proposal. Just after they finished and were about to present the proposal, Ralph Palmer stopped them and said, "It's a mistake." The proposed design would have been built with either point-contact transistors or surface-barrier transistors , both likely to be soon outperformed by
1335-505: A total of 21 kW power. It uses high-speed NPN and PNP germanium drift transistors , with cut-off frequency over 100 MHz, and using ~50 mW each. Some third level circuits use a third voltage level. Each logic level has a delay of about 20 ns. To gain speed in critical areas emitter-follower logic is used to reduce the delay to about 10 ns. It uses the same core memory as the IBM 7090 . The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's IBM 7030 (except for its core memory ) and portions of
1424-477: Is 1.38–1.50 microseconds , multiplication time is 2.48–2.70 microseconds, and division time is 9.00–9.90 microseconds. While the IBM 7030 was not considered successful, it spawned many technologies incorporated in future machines that were highly successful. The Standard Modular System (SMS) transistor logic was the basis for the IBM 7090 line of scientific computers, the IBM 7070 and 7080 business computers,
1513-471: Is called Continuous Benchmarking. As computer architecture advanced, it became more difficult to compare the performance of various computer systems simply by looking at their specifications. Therefore, tests were developed that allowed comparison of different architectures. For example, Pentium 4 processors generally operated at a higher clock frequency than Athlon XP or PowerPC processors, which did not necessarily translate to more computational power;
1602-601: Is controversial. Bethe considered Teller's contribution to the invention of the H-bomb a true innovation as early as 1952, and referred to his work as a "stroke of genius" in 1954. In both cases, however, Bethe emphasized Teller's role as a way of stressing that the development of the H-bomb could not have been hastened by additional support or funding, and Teller greatly disagreed with Bethe's assessment. Other scientists (antagonistic to Teller, such as J. Carson Mark ) have claimed that Teller would have never gotten any closer without
1691-417: Is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing. On reflection on this letter years later when he was writing his memoirs, Teller wrote: First, Szilard was right. As scientists who worked on producing the bomb, we bore a special responsibility. Second, Oppenheimer
1780-409: Is this organization which ultimately decided on how the new weapons should initially be used. The committee's four-member Scientific Panel was led by Oppenheimer, and concluded immediate military use on Japan was the best option: The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of
1869-720: The Albert Einstein Award . He died on September 9, 2003, in Stanford, California , at 95. Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (née Deutsch), a pianist, and Miksa Teller, an attorney. He attended the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest. Teller was an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it
SECTION 20
#17327661414471958-675: The Hungarian People's Republic in Teller's homeland of Hungary, where much of his family still lived, on August 20, 1949. Following the Soviet Union 's first test detonation of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, President Harry Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb . Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. He insisted on involving more theorists, but many of Teller's prominent colleagues, like Fermi and Oppenheimer, were sure that
2047-530: The IBM 7040 and IBM 1400 lines, and the IBM 1620 small scientific computer; the 7030 used about 170,000 transistors. The IBM 7302 Model I Core Storage units were also used in the IBM 7090, IBM 7070 and IBM 7080. Multiprogramming , memory protection, generalized interrupts, the eight-bit byte for I/O were all concepts later incorporated in the IBM System/360 line of computers as well as most later central processing units (CPU). Stephen Dunwell,
2136-467: The Jahn–Teller effect , which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes. Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Stephen Brunauer and Paul Hugh Emmett , Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry :
2225-611: The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was its director or associate director. After his controversial negative testimony in the Oppenheimer security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer , the scientific community ostracized Teller. Teller continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development,
2314-729: The University of Göttingen , then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck , but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee . He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen , where he worked under Niels Bohr . In February 1934 he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi , who
2403-416: The University of Karlsruhe , from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering . He once stated that the person who was responsible for his becoming a physicist was Herman Mark , who was a visiting professor, after hearing lectures on molecular spectroscopy where Mark made it clear to him that it was new ideas in physics that were radically changing the frontier of chemistry. Mark
2492-415: The floating point operation performance of a CPU , but there are circumstances when the technique is also applicable to software . Software benchmarks are, for example, run against compilers or database management systems (DBMS). Benchmarks provide a method of comparing the performance of various subsystems across different chip/system architectures . Benchmarking as a part of continuous integration
2581-592: The 1980s some compilers could detect a specific mathematical operation used in a well-known floating-point benchmark and replace the operation with a faster mathematically equivalent operation. However, such a transformation was rarely useful outside the benchmark until the mid-1990s, when RISC and VLIW architectures emphasized the importance of compiler technology as it related to performance. Benchmarks are now regularly used by compiler companies to improve not only their own benchmark scores, but real application performance. CPUs that have many execution units — such as
2670-599: The Berkeley session, Teller diverted discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the "Super", an early conception of the hydrogen bomb . Arthur Compton , the chairman of the University of Chicago physics department, coordinated the uranium research of Columbia University , Princeton University , the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. To remove disagreement and duplication, Compton transferred
2759-839: The IBM System/360 Models 91 , 95 and 195 , and the IBM 3090 series as well as computers from other manufacturers. As of 2021, these techniques are still used in most advanced microprocessors, starting with the 1990s generation that included the Intel Pentium and the Motorola/IBM PowerPC , as well as in many embedded microprocessors and microcontrollers from various manufacturers. The 7030 CPU uses emitter-coupled logic (originally called current-steering logic ) on 18 types of Standard Modular System cards. It uses 4,025 double cards (as shown) and 18,747 single cards, holding 169,100 transistors, requiring
IBM 7030 Stretch - Misplaced Pages Continue
2848-621: The Interim Committee's decision to drop the bombs, having secretly endorsed an immediate military use of the new weapons. This was contrary to the impression that Teller had received when he had personally asked Oppenheimer about the Szilard petition: that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Following Teller's discovery of this, his relationship with his advisor began to deteriorate. In 1990,
2937-584: The Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory , the precursor of density functional theory , a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, with Nicholas Metropolis , Arianna Rosenbluth , Marshall Rosenbluth , and Augusta Teller , Teller co-authored
3026-656: The MITRE Corporation/Brigham Young University IBM 7030 now reside in the Computer History Museum collection, in Mountain View, California . Instructions are either 32-bit or 64-bit. The registers overlay the first 32 addresses of memory as shown. The accumulator and index registers operate in sign-and-magnitude format. Main memory is 16K to 256K 64-bit binary words, in banks of 16K. The memory
3115-446: The Super, Teller did not work as hard on the implosion calculations as Bethe wanted. These too were originally low-priority tasks, but the discovery of spontaneous fission in plutonium by Emilio Segrè 's group gave the implosion bomb increased importance. In June 1944, at Bethe's request, Oppenheimer moved Teller out of T Division, and placed him in charge of a special group responsible for the Super, reporting directly to Oppenheimer. He
3204-623: The Theoretical (T) Division. He was given a secret identity of Ed Tilden. He was irked at being passed over as its head; the job was instead given to Hans Bethe . Oppenheimer had him investigate unusual approaches to building fission weapons, such as autocatalysis , in which the efficiency of the bomb would increase as the nuclear chain reaction progressed, but proved to be impractical. He also investigated using uranium hydride instead of uranium metal, but its efficiency turned out to be "negligible or less". He continued to push his ideas for
3293-518: The United States in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians" , a group of prominent Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics , spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics . His extension of Enrico Fermi 's theory of beta decay , in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions , provided an important stepping stone in its application, while
3382-489: The actual use of the weapon and implies that Oppenheimer was being hypocritical. Despite an offer from Norris Bradbury , who had replaced Oppenheimer as the director of Los Alamos in November 1945 to become the head of the Theoretical (T) Division, Teller left Los Alamos on February 1, 1946, to return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Fermi and Maria Goeppert Mayer . Goepper-Mayer's work on
3471-548: The assistance of Ulam and others. Ulam himself claimed that Teller only produced a "more generalized" version of Ulam's original design. The breakthrough—the details of which are still classified—was apparently the separation of the fission and fusion components of the weapons, and to use the X-rays produced by the fission bomb to first compress the fusion fuel (by a process known as "radiation implosion") before igniting it. Ulam's idea seems to have been to use mechanical shock from
3560-497: The basis for many of the design features of the successful IBM System/360, which was announced in 1964 and first shipped in 1965. In early 1955, Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California Radiation Laboratory wanted a new scientific computing system for three-dimensional hydrodynamic calculations. Proposals were requested from IBM and UNIVAC for this new system, to be called Livermore Automatic Reaction Calculator or LARC . According to IBM executive Cuthbert Hurd , such
3649-440: The behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry. In 1942, Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer 's summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley , on the origins of the Manhattan Project , the U.S. effort to develop the first nuclear weapons . A few weeks earlier, Teller had been meeting with his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi about
IBM 7030 Stretch - Misplaced Pages Continue
3738-442: The best possible light. Taken together, these practices are called bench-marketing. Ideally benchmarks should only substitute for real applications if the application is unavailable, or too difficult or costly to port to a specific processor or computer system. If performance is critical, the only benchmark that matters is the target environment's application suite. Features of benchmarking software may include recording/ exporting
3827-510: The biggest project management failures in IT history. Within IBM, being eclipsed by the smaller Control Data Corporation seemed hard to accept. The project lead, Stephen W. Dunwell , was initially made a scapegoat for his role in the "failure", but as the success of the IBM System/360 became obvious, he was given an official apology and, in 1966 was made an IBM Fellow . In spite of Stretch's failure to meet its own performance goals, it served as
3916-402: The course of performance to a spreadsheet file, visualization such as drawing line graphs or color-coded tiles, and pausing the process to be able to resume without having to start over. Software can have additional features specific to its purpose, for example, disk benchmarking software may be able to optionally start measuring the disk speed within a specified range of the disk rather than
4005-538: The detonation of Ivy Mike , the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller–Ulam configuration, on November 1, 1952, Teller became known in the press as the "father of the hydrogen bomb". Teller himself refrained from attending the test—he claimed not to feel welcome at the Pacific Proving Grounds —and instead saw its results on a seismograph at Berkeley. There was an opinion that by analyzing
4094-613: The development of the S2 Fortran compiler which was the first to add dynamic arrays , and which was later ported to the Ferranti Atlas of Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton. The 7030 was much slower than expected and failed to meet its aggressive performance goals. IBM was forced to drop its price from $ 13.5 million to only $ 7.78 million and withdrew the 7030 from sales to customers beyond those having already negotiated contracts. PC World magazine named Stretch one of
4183-750: The early 1950s Edward Teller proposed project Sundial at a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission , the bomb was intended to have a yield of 10 gigatons of TNT, while its counterpart, Gnomon, was intended to have a yield of 1 gigaton. Neither device was ever built or tested. Teller became controversial in 1954 when he testified against Oppenheimer at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing . Teller had clashed with Oppenheimer many times at Los Alamos over issues relating both to fission and fusion research, and, during Oppenheimer's hearing, he
4272-504: The elucidation of the implosion mechanism. He was the first to propose the solid pit design that was eventually successful. This design became known as a " Christy pit ", after the physicist Robert F. Christy who made the pit a reality. Teller was one of the few scientists to actually watch (with eye protection) the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, rather than follow orders to lie on
4361-545: The fallout from this test, the Soviets (led in their H-bomb work by Andrei Sakharov ) could have deciphered the new American design. However, this was later denied by the Soviet bomb researchers. Because of official secrecy, little information about the bomb's development was released by the government, and press reports often attributed the entire weapon's design and development to Teller and his new Livermore Laboratory (when it
4450-529: The first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion . That year, he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau . Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek , was also very important for his scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi in 1932, thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics. Also in 1930, Teller moved to
4539-431: The full disk, measure random access reading speed and latency , have a "quick scan" feature which measures the speed through samples of specified intervals and sizes, and allow specifying a data block size, meaning the number of requested bytes per read request. Benchmarking is not easy and often involves several iterative rounds in order to arrive at predictable, useful conclusions. Interpretation of benchmarking data
SECTION 50
#17327661414474628-558: The ground with backs turned. He later said that the atomic flash "was as if I had pulled open the curtain in a dark room and broad daylight streamed in". In the days before and after the first demonstration of a nuclear weapon (the Trinity test in July 1945), Hungarian Leo Szilard circulated the Szílard petition , which argued that a demonstration to the Japanese of the new weapon should occur prior to actual use on Japan , and that
4717-461: The historian Barton Bernstein argued that it is an "unconvincing claim" by Teller that he was a "covert dissenter" to the use of the bomb. In his 2001 Memoirs , Teller claims that he did lobby Oppenheimer, but that Oppenheimer had convinced him that he should take no action and that the scientists should leave military questions in the hands of the military; Teller claims he was not aware that Oppenheimer and other scientists were being consulted as to
4806-468: The hydride bomb, and the result was a dud. Ulam once wrote to a colleague about an idea he had shared with Teller: "Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities; this is perhaps an indication they will not work." Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias . Carey Sublette of Nuclear Weapon Archive argues that Ulam came up with the radiation implosion compression design of thermonuclear weapons, but that on
4895-448: The idea "technically sweet". Though he had helped to come up with the design and had been a long-time proponent of the concept, Teller was not chosen to head the development project (his reputation of a thorny personality likely played a role in this). In 1952 he left Los Alamos and joined the newly established Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory , which had been created largely through his urging. After
4984-537: The internal structure of the elements would earn her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. On April 18–20, 1946, Teller participated in a conference at Los Alamos to review the wartime work on the Super. The properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. It was concluded that Teller's assessment of a hydrogen bomb had been too favourable, and that both
5073-411: The military application best designed to induce surrender ... Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use ... We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use. Teller later learned of Oppenheimer's solicitation and his role in
5162-408: The other hand Teller has gotten little credit for being the first to propose fusion boosting in 1945, which is essential for miniaturization and reliability and is used in all of today's nuclear weapons. Sundial was the codename of one of two massive bombs planned for testing by the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch as part of a classified American weapons project In
5251-447: The pain, including use of the placebo effect , by which he convinced himself that he had taken painkillers rather than water. Werner Heisenberg said that it was the hardiness of Teller's spirit, rather than stoicism , that allowed him to cope so well with the accident. In 1929, Teller transferred to the University of Leipzig where in 1930, he received his PhD in physics under Heisenberg. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of
5340-408: The petition. Teller therefore penned a letter in response to Szilard that read: I am not really convinced of your objections. I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflict and no agreements will help. Our only hope
5429-428: The price of $ 13.5 million was set for the IBM 7030. In 1961, actual benchmarks indicated that the performance of the IBM 7030 was only about 30 times the IBM 704 (i.e. 1.2 MIPS), causing considerable embarrassment for IBM. In May 1961, Thomas J. Watson Jr. announced a price cut of all 7030s under negotiation to $ 7.78 million and immediate withdrawal of the product from further sales. Its floating-point addition time
SECTION 60
#17327661414475518-474: The primary to encourage fusion in the secondary, while Teller quickly realized that X-rays from the primary would do the job much more symmetrically. Some members of the laboratory (J. Carson Mark in particular) later expressed the opinion that the idea to use the X-rays would have eventually occurred to anyone working on the physical processes involved, and that the obvious reason why Teller thought of it right away
5607-496: The project manager who became a scapegoat when Stretch failed commercially, pointed out soon after the phenomenally successful 1964 launch of System/360 that most of its core concepts were pioneered by Stretch. By 1966, he had received an apology and been made an IBM Fellow, a high honor that carried with it resources and authority to pursue one's desired research. Instruction pipelining , prefetch and decoding, and memory interleaving were used in later supercomputer designs such as
5696-473: The project of the H-bomb was technically infeasible and politically undesirable. None of the available designs were yet workable. However, Soviet scientists who had worked on their own hydrogen bomb have claimed that they developed it independently. In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only
5785-431: The prospects of atomic warfare , and Fermi had nonchalantly suggested that perhaps a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Even though he initially explained to Fermi why he thought the idea would not work, Teller was fascinated by the possibility and was quickly bored with the idea of "just" an atomic bomb even though this was not yet anywhere near completion. At
5874-534: The quantity of deuterium needed, as well as the radiation losses during deuterium burning , would shed doubt on its workability. Addition of expensive tritium to the thermonuclear mixture would likely lower its ignition temperature, but even so, nobody knew at that time how much tritium would be needed, and whether even tritium addition would encourage heat propagation. At the end of the conference, in spite of opposition by some members such as Robert Serber , Teller submitted an optimistic report in which he said that
5963-426: The reporter: I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and had difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it." The issue
6052-470: The school. While a degree in chemical engineering was a sure path to a well-paying job at chemical companies, there was not such a clear-cut route for a career with a degree in physics. He was not privy to the discussions his father had with his professors, but the result was that he got his father's permission to become a physicist. Teller then attended the University of Munich , where he studied physics under Arnold Sommerfeld . On July 14, 1928, while still
6141-690: The scientists to the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago. Even though Teller and Mici were now American citizens, they had relatives in enemy countries, so Teller did not at first go to Chicago. In early 1943, construction of the Los Alamos Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico began. With Oppenheimer as its director, the laboratory's purpose was to design an atomic bomb . Teller moved there in March 1943. In Los Alamos, Teller managed to annoy his neighbors by playing piano late at night. Teller became part of
6230-465: The so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm . Teller and Mici became naturalized citizens of the United States on March 6, 1941. When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán , Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of
6319-454: The system. While application benchmarks usually give a much better measure of real-world performance on a given system, synthetic benchmarks are useful for testing individual components, like a hard disk or networking device. Benchmarks are particularly important in CPU design , giving processor architects the ability to measure and make tradeoffs in microarchitectural decisions. For example, if
6408-495: The then newly invented diffusion transistor . IBM returned to Livermore and stated that they were withdrawing from the contract, and instead proposed a dramatically better system, "We are not going to build that machine for you; we want to build something better! We do not know precisely what it will take but we think it will be another million dollars and another year, and we do not know how fast it will run but we would like to shoot for ten million instructions per second." Livermore
6497-412: The weapons should never be used on people. In response to Szilard's petition, Teller consulted his friend Robert Oppenheimer. Teller believed that Oppenheimer was a natural leader and could help him with such a formidable political problem. Oppenheimer reassured Teller that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Bolstered by Oppenheimer's influence, he decided to not sign
6586-454: Was Teller's earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed for the reaction to begin was low, but that even with higher amounts of tritium, the energy loss in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. However, in 1951 Teller and Ulam made a breakthrough, and invented a new design, proposed in a classified March 1951 paper, On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors , for
6675-448: Was Teller's idea. Teller even refused to sign the patent application, because it would need Ulam's signature. Thomas Powers writes that "of course the bomb designers all knew the truth, and many considered Teller the lowest, most contemptible kind of offender in the world of science, a stealer of credit". Whatever the actual components of the so-called Teller–Ulam design and the respective contributions of those who worked on it, after it
6764-500: Was a late talker , but he became very interested in numbers and for fun calculated large numbers in his head. Teller left Hungary for Germany in 1926, partly due to the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy 's regime. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity toward Communism and Fascism . From 1926 to 1928, Teller studied mathematics and chemistry at
6853-562: Was actually developed by Los Alamos). Many of Teller's colleagues were irritated that he seemed to enjoy taking full credit for something he had only a part in, and in response, with encouragement from Enrico Fermi, Teller authored an article titled "The Work of Many People", which appeared in Science magazine in February 1955, emphasizing that he was not alone in the weapon's development. He would later write in his memoirs that he had told
6942-447: Was an expert in polymer chemistry , a field which is essential to understanding biochemistry, and Mark taught him about the leading breakthroughs in quantum physics made by Louis de Broglie , among others. It was his exposure to Mark's lectures that initially motivated Teller to switch to physics. After informing his father of his intent to switch, his father was so concerned that he traveled to visit him and speak with his professors at
7031-528: Was because he was already working on the " Greenhouse " tests for the spring of 1951, in which the effect of X-rays from a fission bomb on a mixture of deuterium and tritium was going to be investigated. Priscilla Johnson McMillan in her book The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race , writes that Teller "concealed the role" of Ulam, and that only "radiation implosion"
7120-478: Was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous programme on the basis of calculations, which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete. During the Manhattan Project, Teller advocated the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work. At Livermore, Teller continued work on
7209-412: Was formally initiated. In November 1956, IBM won the contract with the aggressive performance goal of a "speed at least 100 times the IBM 704 " (i.e. 4 MIPS). Delivery was slated for 1960. During design, it proved necessary to reduce the clock speeds, making it clear that Stretch could not meet its aggressive performance goals, but estimates of performance ranged from 60 to 100 times the IBM 704. In 1960,
7298-539: Was immersion oil-heated/cooled to stabilize its operating characteristics. Edward Teller Edward Teller ( Hungarian : Teller Ede ; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb " and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design based on Stanisław Ulam 's design. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1908, Teller emigrated to
7387-622: Was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement , when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years." Teller
7476-748: Was not impressed, and in May 1955 they announced that UNIVAC had won the LARC contract, now called the Livermore Automatic Research Computer . LARC would eventually be delivered in June 1960. In September 1955, fearing that Los Alamos National Laboratory might also order a LARC, IBM submitted a preliminary proposal for a high-performance binary computer based on the improved version of the design that Livermore had rejected, which they received with interest. In January 1956, Project Stretch
7565-512: Was proposed it was immediately seen by the scientists working on the project as the answer which had been so long sought. Those who previously had doubted whether a fission-fusion bomb would be feasible at all were converted into believing that it was only a matter of time before both the US and the USSR had developed multi-megaton weapons. Even Oppenheimer, who was originally opposed to the project, called
7654-695: Was replaced by Rudolf Peierls from the British Mission , who in turn brought in Klaus Fuchs , who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy . Teller's Super group became part of Fermi's F Division when he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory in September 1944. It included Stanislaw Ulam , Jane Roberg, Geoffrey Chew , Harold and Mary Argo, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer . Teller made valuable contributions to bomb research, especially in
7743-416: Was right. We did not know enough about the political situation to have a valid opinion. Third, what we should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb [very high] over Tokyo and submit that information to President Truman. Unknown to Teller at the time, four of his colleagues were solicited by the then secret May to June 1945 Interim Committee . It
7832-399: Was the only member of the scientific community to state that Oppenheimer should not be granted security clearance. Asked at the hearing by Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) attorney Roger Robb whether he was planning "to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States", Teller replied that: Benchmark (computing) In computing , a benchmark is the act of running
7921-566: Was the sister of a friend. Since Mici was a Calvinist Christian, Edward and she were married in a Calvinist church. He returned to England in September 1934. Mici had been a student in Pittsburgh and wanted to return to the United States. Her chance came in 1935, when, thanks to George Gamow, Teller was invited to the United States to become a professor of physics at George Washington University , where he worked with Gamow until 1941. At George Washington University in 1937, Teller predicted
#446553