Paul Raven @ 09-06-2008
Los Alamos, New Mexico is now home to the aptly-named Roadrunner supercomputer. [image from linked NYT article]
Built by IBM computer scientists using hundreds of Cell microprocessors - hardware originally developed for games consoles, and which power the Playstation 3 - Roadrunner will be used to run simulations of exploding nuclear warheads, although the US military are giving it a run at more pleasant tasks like climate simulation before it settles down to its grim career. [via SlashDot]
Roadrunner clocks in at 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second - that’s nearly twice the speed of IBM’s own Blue Gene/L supercomputer, the previous champion. To put that into perspective, the NYT article equates a petaflop as follows:
“… if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.”
So, yeah - pretty fast.
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Jeremy Eades @ 21-12-2007
The military and video games have had a long history together, going back to flight simulators before WWII. Of course, there’s been America’s Army, but that was a recruitment tool, a way to gloss over the downsides of the Army, namely the permanency of death and having to follow orders.
So where are our “Nintendo soldiers”? Turns out they’re currently working on a suitable training simulation for the US Army. Heck, there’s even a trade magazine devoted to these simulators.
The question isn’t “what are these simulators?”, but “what are they not?” Well, they’re not going to teach you how to shoot and they won’t get you buff. What they will do is provide tactics lessons in a classroom environment that can then be put to use on the training grounds. For more info on the what and why, check out this essay by a training games company, and this paper from the National Defense University. They’re not just random commercial games slapped together, but designed from the ground up to meet training demands.
I’ve played FPS games online since the good ol’ days of Doom II. And with some of the squad-based ones simple tactics can make or break your game. Me? I charge in and promptly die. And then proceed to do it again.
(via DailyTech) (image from renato guerra)
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