While the eagle gets the glory, the penguin is quietly standing guard over America's nukes. The Linux (news - web sites) penguin, that is.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the world's largest Linux clusters -- called Lightning -- will be standing guard over the United States' nuclear stockpile.

Residing on Lightning, Los Alamos' Advanced Simulation and Computing program, or ASCI, will run three-dimensional simulations of nuclear detonations. Scientists "rely on experimental data analysis to understand how [nuclear weapons] are aging," said Los Alamos spokesman Jim Danneskiold.

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