The customer could easily be Russia, U.K., China, France, India, Pakistan, or some other country with nuclear weapons. Not North Korea, though, because Cray/HPE probably can't do business with North Korea.
NERSC is part of DOE’s Office of Science. Nuclear weapon development is done by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which sponsors labs like Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. It definitely isn’t NERSC, NNSA has its own dedicated supercomputers for weapons work.
I very highly doubt France would work with Cray/HPE, or any non-French contractor for that matter, on this. As far as I'm aware, they're working with Bull (now part of Atos).
> I very highly doubt France would work with Cray/HPE, or any non-French contractor for that matter, on this.
If the customer was the Government of France, the line “the customer has nuclear weapons” would be factually accurate irrespective of whether the particular work was on, or even remotely related to, nuclear weapons.
It might not be relevant, but then, even if the work is on a nuclear weapons program, “the customer has nuclear weapons” doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion. Really, short of the case where the customer prefers to motivate software developers with the threat of nuclear annihilation rather than feature bounties, it seems a complete non-sequitur no matter what the work is.
They’re not making a threat. They’re saying it’s important to an org that has thermonuclear weapons. Those people are a very unhumorous lot, and they would not grok why these little libs people would not understand that.
They are obviously not the masters of the domain they think they are, but that happens sometimes in bureaucracies.
