Reducto ad absurdum on the LANL ASCI Q?

A research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has topped a world record for biological simulations, and given us a taste of reducto ad absurdum. As reported in the Nov. 1 issue of PNAS the LANL team, led by Kevin Sanbonmatsu, used 768 of the 8,192 CPUs in LANL's ASCI Q supercomputer to model the motion of 2.64 million atoms in a ribosome complex -- 250,000 in the ribosome itself, and most of the rest from water molecules. The processors chugged away for some 260 days, completing 20 milli