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ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb
totallygeek writes "Redefining the term vaporware, research scientists at Lost Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs detonated two computer simulations. ASCI White, the world's fastest supercomputer, ran the simulations of nuclear explosions. Scientists can now study nuclear weapon replacement components without violating the nuclear test ban, in effect since 1992.
Each simulation used more than 6.6 million CPU hours, which would take home machines 1000 years to complete. The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress. ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops.
The seven month research project ended last Friday, and now the system is ready for use, after its sucessful testing."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
set up us the bomb!
But who needs a simulation? If you have an Athlon, just jiggle the fan off and watch the thing in real life!
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
there was an interesting article in Wired a couple of months ago. It said that very few of our scientists working on nuclear projects had first hand experience with actual testing. I guess this can bring the newer guys up to speed.
Makes you wonder what the government has that its /not/ telling us about... heh
What IS the sound of a 12-teraflop machine crashing with the power of 20 megatons? :)
Oh wait, their massive-parallel (Beowulf cluster, if you will) was probably running AIX, nevermind.
But it would be nice to see the "fallout" of such a huge bluescreen.
(-1, Bad pun.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
My humble Pentium II based desktop can do a pretty good emulation of the effects of a proximate nuclear explosion...I just yank the plug.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I must say this ASCII stuff has come a long way since the days of the dial-up BBS.
: )
Don't read this!
...I wonder if they could answer a question for me. Will it really only be cockroaches and Keith Richards that would live through a nuclear war?
Will countries still want to test nuclear weapons? Of course. A computer may be able to *stimulate* things, but it is *never* a replacement for the actual event. If anything - this will help in the design and initial testing, but when it all comes down to the wire, there will still be 'real' testing required.
Whooo hooo! Way to go RS/6000! Just another notch in the blade of the RISC vs. CISC debate. (And no, I'm not trolling for either side!)
So when I head down to the lab and hunch over the network code for my rs6k machines I can think "these machines are the bomb!"
It'll make me feel better when I crash them with my device drivers.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
But does it play pong?
I wonder what the computing power of SETI@home is. Could such a thing be done with a distributed system across home machines? If a program like this was run on people's computers who had broadband it might be possible to do something similar. The military could even use a system such as this. Since no one has all the program data no secrets would be let out. Everyone is just doing small computations that a larger computer somewhere puts together to make something useful. Hmm......
ahh, the egg in the basket..
I wonder how many LOC it takes to simulate a nuculear explosion. Makes you wander what else you could simulate with 12 trillion calculations per second. Maybe we should try to represent the conflict in the Middle East as a couple of fortran routines and see where we will be after a couple more years of fighting.
This gives me bad flashbacks of "War Games" for some reason. I sure hope ASCI White sucks at tic tac toe.
Maybe we could talk them into running a Medal of Honor: Allied Assualt? They could bill is as a "stratigic nazi slaying simulation".
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
they weren't kidding....
seriously tho, 30teraflops is impressive... we need to put this to work on the cancer research projects as well.. can't let the nuke boys have all the fun..
E-Bomb already means an EMP bomb (See anything by Carlo Kopp). Try P-bomb (pseudo) or f-bomb (haha).
Obviously within a limited problem scope that the machine would be good at. I just wish they were a bit more explicit about this so that non-techies won't tell me how they're worried that machines will be watching them and manipulating them ala-HAL all of a sudden.
Then again why would a non-techie even browse to that page anyway? Never mind.
doesnt it sadden any of you that the sole purpose of this is to find out how to more effectivly kill more innocent civilian lives?
Who saw the headline and thought that they had finally invented giant EMP-bombs, a-la science fiction?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
There's supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.
Wonder how many kkeys/sec it could do on distributed.net
I think the original subject for this post was a bit misleading. This was the first 3d simulation of a nuclear explosion. There have been many previous simulations of nuclear explosions, only they were limited to 2d plots of data. Nuclear explosion and fallout simulation has been the major purpose of supercomputing at Livermore and Los Alamos for decades.
At a peak computational performance of 12.28 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second, it could simultaneously process web transactions for every man, woman, and child on the planet in one minute.
/.'ers let's get this puppy online and see if we have truly met our match or not....
Come on fellow
Rouge nations? What, do you dress them up like whores?
I you're gonna be a dumbass, learn to spell. Rogue
The title of the Star Trek episode where warring
planets conducted battles completely thru computer
simulation. This advance takes us closer to that
future possibilty.
But, instead of modeling Nuclear detonations, I
think the interests of warfare could also be served by setting up an ASCI White as a massive
international UT server, and let national conflicts be settled by a nice game of capture
the flag.
Best two out of three?
If I may make a suggestion, I would like to see this beast of a super-computer used to assist the SETI@home project...
:-)
With this thing's horsepower I would expect to have conclusive findings of extra terrestial life within a matter of weeks and be shaking hands with E.T. by the end of summer...
Also, I must throw in the obligatory comment of "wouldn't you just love a beowulf cluster of these things...".
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
This is the nice kind of vaporware. After all, if we don't have to detonate them, and can expirment with newer designs without building any, there's no loss.
And if you don't have to have them around, there's no risk of them wandering off.
Consistency please HERE
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
wow, if this computer can simulate a nuclear explosion without skipping a beat, then maybe (just maybe) it could run php nuke at a reliable speed.
I read the headline as "ASCII white detonated the first E-bomb"
Wait... ASCII, dumb terminals, email bombs, endless buzzers...it's all coming back to me now.
Isn't this out of date? Next will be "Mainframe successfully runs up to ten users on terminals"
Oh, wait, nuclear bombs simulations. Ok. Never mind. Sorry.
I'll do the obligatory "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" joke, shall I?
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
Congress did not ratify the nuclear test ban treaty.
The only way i can explain this is that some people actually want other countries to develop nuclear capabilities. Which is not that far fetched actually.
maybe the test was successful only because there was no one to shoot back?
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Where did they actually detonate the bombs to prove that the data from the test simulations was reliable? How did they test the simulation without real data to back it up?
Liora
ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops.
I can see all the overclockers salivating already. That is better than the Celeron 300A's running stable at 450Mhz.
or Tic-Tac-Toe?
Would you like to play a game?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
It may stop the US from pulling out of another treaty but it only increases the chance that nuclear weapons will be used by and/or against them.
Nuclear proliferation will not improve your lives in any way. It has a good chance of making you paranoid and miserable, and a very small chance of killing you and everyone you care about.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Could someone explain this conversion? Does it seem arbitrary that 6.6 million CPU years will take 1000 years to cycle on a "home computer"?
What exactly is a "CPU year" anyway? The term seems like it should be intuitive, but if the conversion noted in the article is accurate, it would seem to be a counter-intuitive measure.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
Its primary purpose is to replace nuclear testing that has been banned for ten years -- ten years of having NO idea how the existing warhead supply is aging.
You may agree or disagree with their intended use, but right or wrong there are two critically important things that we have to know as long as a single warhead still exists.
1) As the parts age, will it work as designed, when it needs to go off
2) As the parts age, will it work as designed, when we sure as hell don't want it to.
In either case, failure carries terrifying outcomes. Think about it -- in one case, the warhead doesn't detonate completely, causing an incredible amount of fallout (Chernobyl-style), which is never the intent of a nuclear warhead. In the other case, people dye (very likely in a similarly polluting manner) when it goes off unexpectedly.
As long as nuclear warheads exist, this sort of research is absolutely critical, and its not anyones place to put down this research for ethical reasons related to the existance of the bomb. The two are related but totally separate, and you shouldn't cross those beams.
In a few more years, we'll be able to simulate multiple, simultaneous explosions... and eventually entire wars will be able to be predicted by computer!
Just imagine... new treaties could be put into place to forbid "conventional" war altogether. (Yes, I think I just redefined conventional in this sense...) After all, nobody likes the loss of culture, relics, artifacts, and history due to the side pesky side effect of killing each other. We can simulate wars, and all the people caught in the simulations' destruction zones could simply report to government agencies to be put to sleep in a "humane" fashion. No messy rubble, no rebuilding, no loss of anything "important". This is progress, man... progress!
Oh... and don't mind that starship in orbit. In fact, don't even put them in the simulation. And for god sakes people, don't let them beam anyone down... they'll throw a wrench in the works, I'm just sure of it.
Twilight1
It just so happens that many of these sorts of simulations have runtimes that exceed the mean time between failures of the hardware they run on. I have been told that figuring out how to deal with that (and other failures, like kernel panics and whatnot) along with ancillary decisions (like whether or not it would be better to store an intermediate result or re-calculate it) occupy an awful lot of the time of those who write such things.
I want to see graphical representations of the simulation. Why? Because a nuclear explosion is one of the coolest-looking things around, and since we don't throw nukes at Pacific Islanders anymore, there's no new footage to stare at.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I realize that we have such a huge piece of [ beowulf clustered**had to say it**] piece of hardware, which will be upgraded even further in a couple of months, but what about countries like India, China, Pakistan and other countries that cannot afford such an immense piece of hardware? They will still have to do this thing the old fashioned way, and they will be breaking the ban, i realise that this is a step in the right direction, but i believe we should do more to promote this sort of [virtual] testing, and not ignore it (which is something we did when Bush needed Indian and Pakistani support and when he lifted the sanctions, that were imposed on them after their tests a year or so ago)
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Now, how much processor time do they need to help the e-terminators to protect e-John Conner from the e-Robot Holocaust?
Or prevent e-David Banner from turning into the e-Hulk?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I doubt they are using this massive cluster all the time. They should donate CPU time. I wonder what would happen if they ran distributed.net or seti@home clients on ASCI. Do you think ASCI could actually /. seti@home? hmm...
Greenpeace immediately responded by running simulations of anti-nuke protests on an old 486 sitting on a card table outside Lawrence Livermore Labs.
... and you thought drugs were dangerous before the government figured out how to detonate an E-bomb! Don't keep 'em in your pockets!
so what, it still takes 1 min to process a web request simultainiusly for every man, woman and child on earth...its not that great :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Nice to see that the masters of war have found a way to develop their implements of destruction without resorting to messy nuke tests that could harm children or other living things. Will they have stickers that say, "No animals were harmed in the development of this warhead?" I hope the folks at peta are happy about this.
Are you kidding? The computing power would be at least 50x as great
Actually, that's not the only purpose. It's also capable of simulating nuclear material degradation, enabling better disposal and/or storage techniques for existing, no longer useful material.
Also, future, faster computers (such as the petaflops machine being planned by Sandia National Labs, Compaq and Applera) will be used for genetic engineering and other biology-related research. Naysayers will think "bio weapons", then again, I guess you can find evil intent everywhere if you just look hard enough.
The fact that this was the sane option says a lot about the US, and little of it is good.
There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!
There are sound engineering/technical reasons, which military tech buffs are fond of pointing out, why it would be safe/acceptable to make controlled use of nuclear weapons. The military tech buffs are probably right as far as that goes, which isn't very far. If we're serious about controlling the proliferation of suitcase nukes we have to act multilaterally.
Improving our nuke arsenal - especially after the foreign press has been filled with ill conceived threats/discussions of the possibility that we might use it - is shameful and stupid. We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.
What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.
Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Their stock is down and they are doing all this great stuff, I read the article and some comments then I take the ASCI White link and boom it is IBM...
Why no mention? Why not in the IBM category?
Did it have anything to do with the HP ad that I saw in the comments field? Is this still april 1st?
The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress.
:)
The Library of Congress was an interesting comparison back when CD-ROM drives were first becoming popular 10 years ago, and laymen had no clue about the storage capabilities of computers. Now it's just plain stupid.
Imagine if hard drives were specd in KLOCs - thousands of libraries of congress.
I would also have to echo the comments from several other posters, couldn't they use thing for something more beneficial? And, yes, I am well aware of the spin-off effect that often happens in military techinology, but it's still a question I have to ask.
forma3
Well, fallout causes cancer doesn't it?
If I email them my SS#, can they tell me if I lived through it?
Quite a few people have quoted the Teraflops/sec of Seti@home for comparision, perhaps suggesting that there is a better way of attacking these sorts of problems. I think if this sort of problem were amenable to a "widely distributed" computing attack we'd already all be running a covert client as part of our new windows XP installation (at least us windows users).
Simulating nuclear explosions however is the sort of problem that requires the generation of massive amounts of data and intensive communications between computing nodes. Not something that's going to work well over a dialup connection...
-josh
The computing power of all of the computers on the internet would probably be greater, but would only be effective if this test can be run with most of the calculations being done in parallel. Otherwise it wouldn't really matter!
20$ says that somewhere in there, they forgot to carry the one.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
From the picture, it looks like WOPR!!! I want to play Global Thermonuclear War!!
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Spammers. Let's use the awesome power ASCI White to send opt-out messages on behalf of every IP address on the Internet to all of the spammers in nanae. Now that's the e-bomb in action.
Don't people watch the movies??? HAL has already simulated all that stuff... ;)
If the nuke project had a screen saver of cool mushroom clouds, blast waves and other eye candy people would be all over it.
They could give a shit if it meant speeding up the extermination of homo sapiens.
Hi, I am writing you this to ask your advice. See you later. Thanks.
[detonates northern New Mexico]
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
This kind of software if it would escape the lab (and the past has proven more than enough that anything that can escape will escape, remember those missing harddrives) combined with the pc's that you can buy at fry's in a few years time will allow any rogue nation to design their own without wisening anybody else because they no longer have to test their stuff in order to reach a high level of confidence that it will work in practice. Now at least we KNOW that Pakistan and India have the bomb (they probably wanted us to know, but there are some that do not want you to know until they hit you).
MP3 Search Engine
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we respect other nations' sovereignty.
Has anyone ever noticed that national sovereignty and international law are mutually exclusive? This poster appears to be supporting both. When the rubber meets the road, where do most Slashdotters stand on this issue? I think they stand firmly on the side of international law. And that seriously scares me.
Discuss.
E-nuclear bombs...
How about a beowulf cluster of these?
I can't believe I just posted that.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Now don't take me wrong. I appreciate how much of a technical marvel this is, but ....
The test ban was enacted so that nations would STOP designing better planet-busters. Now we have shown that it is possible for people to design nukes in thier basement (assuming their basement has a 12 teraflop computer).
Should we feel any more secure knowing that India and Pakistan can now quietly design better atomic arsenals to annihilate each other with?
In a 2nd strike, EBCIDIC Detontates its First E-Bomb as a show of strength.
Then in a further show of strength, UNICODE detonates its first E-bomb.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
:ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops
...
.. what did i just say ?
.. that was not me ..
Ohhhhhh, if one could only put all these flops for the good use in cryptography-related activity
hmm
oh, wait
3.243F6A8885A308D313
is it once Windows installed? I am guessing it may just be as fast as a 2GHz Pentium with 256Mb running linux?
Mark
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
The wristwatch you wear will contain many many times more computing power than this :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Peer to peer software company Kazaa anounced that they would enter a new e-arms-race with the U.S. government. To do this, they will utilize the unused CPU power in their client's computers. In response, the Dutch government issued a statement saying, "Hey man, this is good shit! Want a hit?"
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Well, I hope they find Alamos... First it was equipment, now its the whole facility!!
Lost Alamos... I kill me!
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
Only if you take them both as absolutes, and believe that countries can't sign onto any international law treaties without giving up all of their sovereignty.
Does agreeing to abide by state and federal law mean that individuals give up all their individual rights and freedoms? No, of course not.
Same thing.
I have yet to see how this will enhance my life on a daily basis, i.e. better porn
I guess they could simulate how my roommates huge stack of porn would be affected by a nuclear blast.
Porn.
ok I will stop.
This
...and I'm ready to report to my disintegration chamber.
Advice: on VPS providers
someone get me a tractor! i'm taking that baby to a LAN!!!!
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
When I was working in a Bacterial Genomics lab, I used to crave faster, more powerful computers to crunch through genomic data. This type of computing power is a dream for bioinformaticists who want to, for example, create targeted cures for bacterial disease based on specific genetic idioms.
What is unfortunate is that we have an expensive, tax-payer funded processor farm that is dedicated to the useless pursuit of studying weapons of mass destruction. A great text about the myths of US nuclear policy can be found in Michio Kaku's (with Dan Axelrod) To Win a Nuclear War. It's in the style of a book like "The Hacker Crackdown", well researched, and really interesting.
If you are interested in stopping Nuclear Weapons Research in the US, another great site is that of Nobel Peace Prize Winning group Intl. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). I think it's telling to compare IPPNW's site to the Defense Department's Moronic Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team web site!
does it have a built in watermark detector for downloading only legit digital media?
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
If they've already built the thing, how can it be 3x faster than "the most powerful computer in existence today"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mod this person up! I agree, this type of computer research is sick! Why isn't this processor farm being used for, say, bacterial genomics?
....What kind of FPS i'll get running Return to Castle Wolfenstein......
Ummm, err, say what, now?
The theory behind a nuclear bomb is very simple, any first year student in a real course(read not arts/social science) at university could make one. This is a study on the inner workings of the explosion, which has nothing to do with making one. I knew how to build one after my grade 8 prodject on Oppenhimer. The reason people cannot just make them is the ban on the sale of the parts neaded to make a bomb.
STFU
imagine a BeoWulf cluster of those! :P
perlgolf: the only place where shorter is better
"ASCI White will possess more than 160 trillion bytes of IBM disk storage capacity, holding 16,000 times more data than the average desktop PC."
Give me broadband, and a P2P client, I'll eat that up right quick.
A Beowulf cluster of these.... Wait it is a cluster... AHHH a beowulf cluster of a beowulf cluster.
You can mod me down now
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
I don't fear any counrty that developes it's own nuclear bomb - a cretain amount of civilisation is required in order to achieve such a feat.
Specifically, you need Nuclear Power and Rocketry, plus you need to build the Manhattan Project. Except the damn Mongols keep put SDI Defense everywhere.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
In other words, it will simply run through a set of possible behaviours that science currently expects of it. Not it's actual behaviour.
Doing this in the real world might throw up new information that hadn't prevoiusly been predicted. Doing it on a computer seems like an exercise in scientific back-slapping to me.
Cheers,
Ian
Laurence Livermore Labs just signed a contract with Brilliant Digital for the extra 18 TeraFlops.
A BD spokesman says "Why have the power of a 1000 desktops when you can have Millions (evil cackle)"
Kazaa users around the globe were saddened to learn that they do not have enough 'left over' CPU cycles to acually decode and listen to their MP3s.
"All your cycles are belonging to us!"
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
The point of war is to kill people till the other side decides it is in their best interest to capitulate.
Sadly, wars will always be a fact of human existence until people stop either evolve, or kill themselves off.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be a smartass ar troll, and I'm certainly no maths professor, but I'd really like to know how they're so sure that they're right.
I mean, with all of this wonderful math, we can't even predict the weather reliably. We can't predict hurricaines or tornadoes, much less lightning or earthquakes.
And on that note, are there any massively parallel or distributed computing projects currently running to simulate the weather or the other natural phenomena mentioned above?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Roller ball had giant corporations that owned massive amounts of land, much like nations (civilization was supposed to have evolved to these massive companies controlling everything..)
Instead of settling disputes via war- the corporations relied on "the game" (ala rollerball). How ever, instead of being peaceful, it quickly got more and more violent - and more and more people died, just on a smaller scale then a full war.
So no, playing UT againt someone to solve a dispute might work on a personal scale, but not a national one.
This
is this a truly great achievement?
or a terrible misuse of technology?
quick! someone tell me what to think!
(where's jon katz when you need him?)
goats.com: better than
seriously though, what about running some kind of AI on this thing? Alice the chatbot at 12 teraflops....? I'd reroute my support calls to the thing, but I don't think it would put up with some of the callers.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Oh, I don't know, but maybe 1992 is a good guess?
...developing and testing devices whose sole purpose is to /further/ destroy useful resources. This entire endeavor is an economic drain on the world, not only for its diversion of useful means, but for the ends to which they are (mis-)applied.
Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard are turning over in their graves...
Does this thing have ibm travelstar gxp75 drives?
I think my hard disk in my supercomputer crashed
have you run the drive fitness test?
Yes, it passed, but i'm fairly sure the smoking drive is bad
we need you to run the drive fitness test, are you in front of the computer?
I'm directly in front of it
Pull out the hard drive please
I'll brb, it's a few miles over
You said you were in front of it
I am in front of it
Does this supercomputer of yours have a serial number?
This is ASCI WHITE damn it.
I can't look up your warranty without a serial number
1. The serial number is 1.
I can't find that in our database, do you have a proof of purchase?
ACKKKKKKKKKKKKK
"Why isn't this processor farm being used for, say, bacterial genomics?"
You'd rather have potentially defective nuclear weapons at our disposal than advancing bacteria research?
I can see it now: "The United States was forced to launch a nuclear assault on Iraq today. Unfortunately, the first bomb that went off was powerful enough to scare birds away. In live television address, Saddam Hussein's speech was surprisingly short. 'Ha ha!', he said as he pointed in the general direction of the United States."
There's a pretty big difference between modelling a nuclear explosion (or an explosion of any kind) and performing Seti like research. For one thing, Seti can divvy up the data to process into really small chunks, making it easy to distribute it across a number of machines.
This cannot be done with an explosion of any kind. The reason is that you have LOTS of particles interacting with each other. For each interaction, every single particle needs to be re-calculated. This is why you cannot divvy up the data and spread it across a lot of machines. This is why you need to use a computer like this to do the calculation.
I'm not sure what kind of math is done for genome related stuff, so I cannot really comment on that. I'm willing to bet, though, they could spread it across as many machines as they need. If they need a machine like the one being used in this article, they could probably lease run time off it.
"Derp de derp."
If you have an Athlon, just jiggle the fan off and watch the thing in real life!
I guess that makes my motherboard a MIRV...
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
People are really like that. If you had a referendum on capital punishment and the choices were:
1) Yes, televised nationwide
2) Yes, not televised
2) No capital punishment
I can pretty much guarantee you that (1) would get the most votes. People are kind sick and twisted.
It'll be in your PDA in ten years time ;)
Let's have a look at this list, shall we?
Do you see India or Pakistan anywhere on the top 20? No? How about any other 'rogue nation?'
Never mind that they'd need a bunch of highly classified test data to run simulations with.
I think we can safely say neither India nor Pakistan will be simulating any nukes, for the time being.
"Oh, by the way, there's this little F00F bug in those chips, but the average user won't run into it for years and years."
Jouster
Great, we should now fight all wars this way. Let the computers battle it out amongst themselves.
I thought Falco dropped the first eBomb back in '85.
..OUCH, Ouch, stop bitch slapping me!
Wasn't there an old Star Trek about this?
Do some of us have to report to out local disintegration chambers now?
=brian
Priority 1: World Peace.
Priority 2: Reducing or eliminating the need for physical testing of nuclear warheads, an important part (for the time being, at least) of maintaing the U.S.'s nuclear deterrent to war. ASCI White does this.
Priority 3: Provide for world happiness--this includes your proposal.
See my point? If people have energy, but are DEAD, they don't tend to enjoy the fact that they have the energy.
Jouster
From the title, I thought this was some new DoS attack. I guess I was at least slightly disappointed : Magius_AR
>which would take home machines 1000
>years to complete
Did they take Moore's Law into account when coming up with this estimate? I'm willing to be that we will have some pretty powerful desktop computers in 200 years.
From the we-have-no-moral-context department
Does anyone else find this kind of "gee whiz" attitude towards weapons designed to kill the largest number of civilians possible somewhat distasteful? I know I do, particularly now that the US government is actively looking at ways to use nuclear-weapons on the battlefield, rather than as an absolute last resort.
The article takes about the simulation of nuclear bomb. I think the Athlon is more suitable to simulating a nuclear meltdown.
I'm curious to know what kind of AIDS research you think could be done with a really fast computer? Most problems aren't suited to just throwing lots of computer power at them.
Furthermore, when equipment like this is built for military testing, the result almost always benifits other fields shortly afterward. After the DOE is done playing with it, time on the machine will be available for other research. You can rent CPU time on most of the ASCI machines the DOE has built in the past. Without the defense spending on nuclear simulation, this machine probably wouldn't have been funded in the first place.
Does agreeing to abide by state and federal law mean that individuals give up all their individual rights and freedoms? No, of course not.
I never said it did. But it isn't quite that simple anyway: which local customs, morals, and rights are you willing to give up so that someone from the other side of the world can have what they think is right? Likewise, what are they going to give up and what are you going to gain?
Furthermore, what set of laws make sense in: Manhattan and Topeka and Mogadishu and London and Moscow and Tokyo and Jakarta and Mecca and in every other town? I submit to you that the set is empty. Even our own national legislature has gone to far in normalizing law. The Constitution originally gave local governments a lot more freedom to do what was right in their own jurisdiction than what is granted now. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution has been especially abused to exert illegal power on a national level, for example.
Sorry, but there is very broad class of simulations where distributed computing across the internet is not going to help, called Finite Element Analysis. I don't know the specifics of nuclear explosion simulations, but the basic setup is similar to simulations of electromagnetic fields, mechanical stress and strain, heat transfer, the weather, etc. You divide the volume of interest up into lots of little cells (the "finite elements"). For a cell, you determine how conditions in a cell are influenced by influenced by neighboring cells, as well as the pre-existing condition of the cell. You code those equations into a program, and it cycles through all the cells to calculate the next state (one time tick later), then repeats until done.
) +T0(x,y,z-1)+T0(x,y,z+1))/6. You need special forms of this equation for cells at the edges. You write _for_ loops to cycle through all the cells and an outside _for_ loop to step through the time ticks -- or you might use a pre-written simulation program where you just have to plug in the cell geometry and the equations. Nuclear simulations must be considerably more complicated: it would require several variables tracking temperature, local concentrations of reacted and unreacted materials, radiation density, etc., and equations tracking how materials, flow in and out of the cells, among other things.
For instance, in a heat transfer simulation, the temperature of a cell changes from the initial temperature towards the average temperature of neighboring cells at a rate determined by the thermal conductivity of the material: T1(x,y,z) = (1-k)*T0(x,y,z) + k*(T0(x-1,y,z)+T0(x+1,y,z)+T0(x,y-1,z)+T0(x,y+1,z
But the point is, even at the most complicated, the calculations for one cell at one time tick are only going to take a few microseconds on a decent CPU. If you parallelize it by assigning one CPU to a cell, the CPU will do the calculations, then it will have to exchange data with all the other CPU's. The communications requirements can be met only by providing lots of direct dedicated CPU-CPU, or CPU-memory-CPU links. That is, it takes custom hardware. Try to do it through any kind of shared bus, and the comm bandwidth will severely limit the number of CPU's that can be actually used. Don't even think of trying to use the internet with latencies of seconds, and bandwidths of 56KHz to a few MHz.
This is bad news, not for DOE who have the money to build that custom hardware (and would have to keep their bomb secrets in-house anyhow), but for all the engineers and scientists who would love to have thousands of computers crunching their data for free, but their equations aren't suitable for it. For SETI@home, I think each computer gets a module consisting of one piece of recorded data and a batch of tests to be run against it; the modules do not have to communicate in between setup and completion, so little bandwidth is needed. It's great when it works, but we only know how to divide up big computing jobs completely like that for a few special cases.
Honestly, I've considered Windows an E-bomb for years. You as much as sneeze and it will bomb out on you as often as not.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I just wanted to clarify something for people thinking 'But isn't ASCII White a bunch of machines?'
Yes, It is. But they are tightly intercoupled with an IBM SP Switch that has something like 300MB (Yes, Mega BYTE) second non-blocking throughput to handle the internode communication, both at the rack (16 machine) and cluster (In ASCII White's case, it's 128 racks I believe, 128 racks of 16 4-way Power3 SPs, I've been in the same room with it but didn't touch it/work on it/have anything to do with it except go 'whoa' when someone pointed it out to me) I'm probably wrong on the interconnect speed, I think it's much faster now. I'm a bit behind on IBM's SP stuff. Spend to much time watching Myrinet.
I'd like to take a gander at the parallel coding that was done to get this kind of simulation. This can't be a batch mode program (like distributed.net and seti) like you said. It'd be quite facinating, though I'm sure they'd shoot you after you read it for that Top Secret stuff.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Your motherboard is a Multiple, Independant Rentry Vehicle?
The first? Outlook and Outlook Express have been detonating them for years.
I wonder if mathew broderick was involved ?
This is old news. Note the date on the release, it's from 2000!
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
just wondering what the FPS would be
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
This study was completed April 5, 2002. The previous articles have nothing about the results, just the information going into the study.
Click here or here.
ASCII building 451 Construction Scrapbook
Dammit, I want one of those, droool.
50+3+1-1+2-1=49? Methinks the cap coder screwed the pooch. How about we apply batch net karma at 1am GMT daily?
No, the problem is that Karma is updated with each Entry. It would be bettwer if a Karma Score were calculated for an article, and then a person's Karma was a summation of of all the articles Karma Scores.
So it should be 50 + article
article = 3+1-1+2-1 = 4
Karma stays at 50
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Future wars will be fought as simulations too, right?
We can only wish.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Look, I have seen many comments here about how bad or 'evil' the simulations being run on this machine are. The simple fact remains, nuclear weapons exist, and our country possesses a large number of nuclear weapons. Regardless of my personal opinions this remains a fact, and as such does not involve concepts such as 'bad' or 'evil'.
Now, to take a step back from this and to look at other related software. Many years ago I worked with engineering company which among other things designed manufacturing processes for artificial fibers. The chemicals needed to do this are sometimes very toxic, and must be handled very carefully. When working for this company I saw for the first time simulation software for real world events. Basically there were several packages which given: a chemical, container, storage characteristics, weather, and a site location could from a selection of catastrophic events calculate the results of a chemical leak (explosion, toxic cloud release, etc.), would tell you what the effects of the nearest city would be. This definitely has what would be considered to bad or evil applications. However used properly in the hands of the engineers it would tell them that a given problem would have the following results. This data would allow them to modify their storage systems to prevent such things from happening (the modifications may not prevent a chemical release, but it would prevent the chemical from effecting the populations near a plant). And as such this software was not only a good thing, but from any stand point incredibly beneficial.
Now back to the ASCII system.
Given that I do not understand very much about these nuclear weapons I have to leave it in the hands of those who do have the proper education to deal with these things. And since we already possess these weapons I want people who know how these weapons work looking after them. Since I really do not want these weapons detonated for any reason, I am very happy to see software developed which can (or at least I hope), accurately simulate the use and life cycle of these weapons. It may be difficult to see past the immediate and obvious uses of such software, however I believe that there are beneficial uses of such simulations. As a result I am very happy to hear about this stuff and encourage its use.
God forbid the Cyber-Terrorists should get their hands on this! Good thing we have the far-reaching grasp of the Patriot Act and the new Cyberterrorism Act ready to defend us.
.
I think . .
Rob Carlson
Okay, teraflops mean nothing to me. My puny brain can't handle it. Just tell me how fast it can compile the latest kernel!
Heh.
...this gives a whole new dimension to DOS attacks
managers...why god invented purgatory
Simple. They just hired Mindcraft to do the benchmarking. :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I would vote for 2, hey hang on a moment I meant 3 but there wasn't a 3. Say, you did the Florida ballot didn't you :-)
As for people being sick and twisted, we are, but executions are not a sign of this. If we have executions they should be public executions, media circus and all. Not hidden out of sight so everybody can tell themselves they live in a civillised country.
I'm not sure why there are so many people sickened as disgusted by resources be allocated for the ASCI project.
http://www.llnl.gov/asci/overview/
br>
Personally, I don't have a problem with spending money on making sure that a warhead doesn't detontate when it's not supposed to. Do I care that they might find ways to make the warhead more efficient in the mean time? No. Military projects have always driven technological progress...I'd be willing to bet that the majority of you squawkers will happily reap the benefits of parallel computation discoveries made by project like this without thinking twice about it.
I thought the first and biggest E-Bomb was the Apple Newton.
And it'll still take X an hour to load *grin*
Well, if More's law holds up:
Nucular Detonation =1000 years of CPU (from article)
Assume CPU speed doubles every two years.(More's Law)
Log(1000)/ Log(2) =9.96578 (Base 2 Log of 1000)
9.96578 * 2=19.9316 (Every two years)
Therefore in 20 years you should be able to do nuclear detonations on your Playstation. Better start putting export restrctions on those Playstations again...
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
1 Library of Congress == 10 terabytes of text!.
That's a little hard to believe - I figure 10TB would be on the order of 20 billion printed pages of text.
The W87 Warhead in current is already optimal! The LEP is proof of that.
Surety and command and control systems are more important in 2002 than physics simulation of actual detonations. Really, read on...
Apart from adding LAX-112 (Los Alamos stable explosive) instead of 1980s PBX-9502 and LX-17 from Livermore. (LX-l7 Is most popular in this suitcase-containable bomb), few things other than antispoof sensor and newer anti-tamper hardware need to be added.
The real problem is installing newer technologies when retrofitting to make it harder for hackers and engineers to set one off without its failsafes.
Failsafes (surety) to prevent unauthorized detotation are the most complex part of bomb engineering... not silly simulations of micro-bombs on ASCII white clusters.
These failsafe technologies have many buzzwords but are commonly called Permissive Action Links (PALs), and surety.
Many 12 digit Category F combinations currently exist but have self shutdown if too many errant codes sent to a w87 warhead.
The weapons are very good at destroying themselves electonically and physically without spilling plutonium as well.
Other than PALs, the amazing W87 also uses the Enhanced Nuclear Detonation Safety system (ENDS) developed by Sandia National Laboratories.
ENDS has lots of tamper resistence and failsafe redundancy and isolation of circuits.
A valid AMAC can be created to arm a W87 if opening the case is too challenging to a team of highly motivated engineers.
Even with codes though setting off a W87 warehead requires that each sensor is defeated.
This would include gyros, magnetometers, accelerometers, vibration sensors, and pressure transducers. Trajectory is estimated too! To prevent obvious tampering many of these were made microminiature by Sandia in EFI. (Enhanced Fidelity
Instrumentation) to replace existing larger psuedo-JTAs (Joint Test Assemblies). Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) current "good stuff" derives from FTU-12 (flight test unit 12) from Sandias Telemetry group (8416) and Sandias Weapons Project Group, Ed Talbot (lead), Cheryl Lari, and John Liebenberg (all in 2266).
More modern anti tamper stuff includes on-board millimeterwave radar no doubt (but classified).
Such radar would be part of the Environmental Sensing Devices (ESDs) (which determine the correct environmental conditions detonation)
The W87 weapon needs to sense spinning along its axis and pressure drop and many special measurements to detonate... even if the codes are cracked or force-probed. Sandia's MDL center 1300 (Microelectronics Development Laboratory) is tasked the challenge of defeating hardware probing and electro induced hacking of surity.
The W87 lacks coherent Lightning Arrestor Connectors (LACs), but does not need them intramodule because of its design. Multiple attempts using high energy to set of a warhead would probably just zap the circuits of the RBP (Reentry Body Programmers) or the WP (Warhead Programmers)
So at this point the W87 ( mankinds greatest technological weapon achievement) is a safe very high yield, ultra compact, tamper proof nuke.
The NSA in 1998 made it more "secure" by merely making components of its arming overly "obscure". Security through obscurity is asinine no doubt, but nevertheless the methods outlined in DIST (Defense Integrated Support Tools database) are now "top secret" even though an open crypto safe protocol would have been sufficient. The GAO, op cit., 13 August 1997, p. 8 was the last public analysis of the DIST containing the arming parts along the command chain to a W87.
You cant simulate anti-hacking anti-ICE anti-emulator anti-virtualmachine anti-clockvariance and anti-forcelatching with a damned ASCII white propaganda simulation of a mini-detonation. You need IQ and paper and pen.
The current thinking about nuclear arms development is not to build more powerful weapons for the sake of thems selves, but to stay so far ahead of nations thinking about obtaining nuclear weapons that they will be hopelessly behind. Nuclear programs are VERY expensive, if a country has no hope of even being competitive, it will be much harder for them to justify the expense.
In shoter terms, keep the lead so large that no one will want to play.
i don't totally agree with this thinking, but from a certain perspective, it makes sense.
Organicsculpture.com
Living near water makes a lot of sense for easy living. And, being away from it does not save you from weather: hail, tornados, earthquakes, mudslides, etc. Since 2/3 of the Earth's surface is H20, we need to figure that a decent percent of people will be affected by it.
Click here or here.
http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/docs/2002-03-07-ASCI_Miles tone_Release.pdf
Now that would definitly give a new meaning to the word "mailbomb".
lone, dfx
Sadly, this process is exceedingly questionable. It's like running constant speadsheets about how well your business was doing without actually making or selling anything. Nothing is going to replace the occasional detonation for ensuring engineering quality control, and we were fools for signing the pesky treaty.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
check out this link. It goes into various types of EMP bombs, device hardness, etc.
heh, offtopic as hell I suppose, but I agree with ya %100 on that on that last part.
Some problems are easy to parallelize, like SETI - each user gets handed the radio blips from a given chunk of the sky and crunches numbers to see if there's an alien there, and then every couple of hours sends in a "No, nobody there either" message and gets another chunk of sky to look in. Other problems are harder to parallelize, like turbulent airflow over non-smooth surfaces - each processor crunches a bit about the uncoming chunks of air over its chunk of surface, figures out where they're going and how twisty they are and hands them to the next processor, which has just done the same thing and changed all the inputs on that side, and going three-dimensional makes it worse, but if each processor is only interacting with its neighbors, that's still easier than if any change in the system changes everything else in the system. Also, memory bandwidth capabilities differ substantially between Big Iron machines vs. Lots Of PCs, and some problems really need that.
ASCI White is somewhere in between the Beowulf kind of network and the Super-Mega-Cray kind of machine, with tightly-coupled clusters of processors tied together by still-pretty-fast interconnects.
As somebody else pointed out, the military couldn't really use home machines for their computing, because the information about the design and engineering of nuclear explosives would leak out, and there are some things that are better off No Source At All than Open Source... But there are many problems that could use similar technology, either rooms full of small machines, or for some less security-critical applications, they might be able to use lots of PCs on bureaucrats' desks (except that if they still do procurement the way they used to, there are a lot of machines that have probably been upgraded to Pentium66s or Pentium133s from their predecessor Z248 286s, but are otherwise Not Blazingly Fast because if they're good enough to run a browser and a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, they're really just fine for 95% of the users.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When you get bored trying to help us find alien life with SETI@home, why don't you help us get rid of the life already here, with nuclearannihilation@home.
On the other hand, sometimes they're just trying to schedule a parade or a general's golf game :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bunker busters are also lower yield than city busters, but that's because there are times you want to make a 100-ton or 1 kiloton hole in the ground without having to haul in a kiloton of high explosive or making a 20kiloton Hiroshima-sized hole in the ground and wiping out the city. Similarly, "Tactical nuke" is defined as "Designed for use in Germany" -- some of the nuclear cannon shells are designed for taking out Russian tank forces without wasting the country.
But yes, both of these are relatively scary, in that they lower the threshold for nuclear use to some thinkable, as opposed to Mutually Assured Destruction. This did deter the Russians, but it also made it easier for the US to step on Russian satellites so it wasn't decreasing the chance of war, just changing the terms and the probable battlegrounds.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Will there be a doom III port on it? :)
33 teraflops... you could calculate true radiosity/raytracing/caustics/shadows/photon maps/etc in realtime with that bitch (without using some fake lightmap effects and such).
You know what's weird? We're all impressed by this machine, but seeing how things evolve, that thing will probably be the "new and improved edition" of my kid's "GameBoy RealLife (TM)" in a not too distant future... unbeleivable. I just hope Carmack will "live long and prosper" to get to this, and me to enjoy it.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
The fact that very few have gotten this is makeing me feel old.
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
Yeah - two Athlon 1.4MP warheads
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
So other than nuke labs, governments, universities, government weather bureaus, and computer companies that make really big computers, most of the really big computers are run by financial institutions. There's the occasional petroleum company, Pharma, or car company, and some universities that are smaller and might be doing non-government research, but there basically isn't a lot of general industry until you get down to about #150 around 200 GFlops (in particular, there are a bunch of 128-processor HP machines from 150-180.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I thought the first and biggest E-Bomb was the Apple Newton.
Faux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
A dingo ate my sig...
On the other hand, I'd rather donate a few cycles to a virtual nuke than have the government actually explode one to test it.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
I think this is the real reason why they are doing this:
Its much cheaper to send an email to the president of an enemy country, with an attachment thats a simulation of a few nukes being dropped on their country, then it is to actually do it. Its just a new diplomacy tool =)
Preach on, brother. I realized I had poor cooling in my PC when the Athlon 1.33 GHz CPU fried itself one week ago. It actually smells like a microwaved CD when you turn it on now...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I would be interested to know how long this machine takes to find primes etc.
A neat trick for old CPU's, chips, bugs, and other insects for detonation purposes, is a stout motor capacitor from an air conditioner and a high voltage DC power supply found from a discarded laserjet. I have seen 480uF capacitors rated at 480 volts actually hold 8KV generated from the drum power supply. Now wire up a dozen of these capacitors to charge two parallel plates.
Arm the bomb. This will take a few minutes. Defective capacitors will report with a large bulge on the side and may jump off the table. Safety glasses, leather gloves and jacket are recommended. Hearing protection is manditory. If everything goes well, a large concentration of potential energy will rest between those two deadly plates.
Now drop the old electronic part or pesky insect between the plates. Observe the complete destruction. Some flying parts from silicon chips may damage surrounding areas. Insects will be completely vaporized and harmless.
Xray radiation during detonation should be minimal unless voltage is increased somewhere around 30KV. Be careful!
so, do we actually know the physics of nuclear explosions well enough that such a powerful computer can serve us? last i knew, we were a bit shaky on the whole quantum-level interactions ... wouldn't those show up fairly well here? or are more classical (newtonian) physics sufficient for this?
... quake is a much better use for it.
i'd just hate to waste all that cpu power on an equation that isn't accurate
Then they should stop using Unix and use a real fault tolerant operating system.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Amazing (and very pretty) work.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Nuclear Bomb -> Nuclear Fallout -> Cancer
:)
See, they are on a Cancer project
Maybe you live in interesting times
Yes america does a lot of things while it is convenient. They sign treaties and then when it isn't convinient anymore they break them. To hell with whether it is for the common good or not.
America signs a trade agreement to lower tariffs, sometime down the track it is not "convienent" so they put the tariffs up anyway and screw some smaller country. America treat their detainee's inhumanely and claim that, technically, they are not POW's, so they are not bound by the Geneva convention. Because they aren't POW's does that mean they aren't human and should not be protected by that convention?
This is why there are people who don't like the USA.... This is why some people crash planes into buildings... and this is why some people are not sorry about it.... arrogance, and hypocracy... this is why people dislike the USA.
-- Cut and paste is not code re-use!
Wait...you don't see seti@home as a tremendous resource sink? Hmm. Protein folding would have been a decent example. Searching for little green men that aren't there is a lousy example.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
the ocr was pretty bad on it
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Someone has to say the dorky, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these." I guess it'll be me.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Lessee...we can simulate the intricate details of a nuclear explosion but not the heaving, naked body of Natalie Portman???
Helloooo! Priorities people!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
So, with ASCI White you could simulate a nuclear explosion happening right outside Bill Gates' house. I know I would.
Things seem bad when you buy a new PC and a faster one is in the shops a month later; imagine how IBM will feel when someone brings out a faster machine than the ASCI White. Serve them right.
http://www.cookiedude.com
Deliberately Different Design
Deliberately Different Design
It was perfectly simulated ahead of time in real time in 3d.
No, we didn't use any EMP devices. The only neat toy that you might be thinking of was a specialized bomb that was used on power distribution facilites. It basically a chaff bomb, with strips set so that the electrical systems would short circuit and be destroyed, without any harm to anyone. People around the target definately were happy we used that instead of 500-2000 pound bombs.
I didn't say that WWII was the war to end all wars. That would be silly. But US military doctrine doesn't depend on mass conscription anymore. It depends on very high levels of training of a volunteer force and high levels of technology (e.g. *fewer* bombs to eliminate targets). There isn't any reliance on calling up civilians for military service, and no reliance on a massive switch of the civilian economy to a military standing.
The point was in response to a previous poster who claimed targeting civilians and the industrial infrastructure (with nukes) was going to be a strategy in future conflicts. It wouldn't work against the US.
The "world vs. Islam" is not going to look like WWII either. Hopefully it won't get nuclear either; the West can easily handle any conventional threat, and nothing can "defend" against some unconventional threats, but it isn't clear the West could be "defeated" by unconventional means either. What does it mean for Islam to win? Convert us all to fundamentalist Islam? Sink the West into a dark age? Get US troops out of Saudi Arabia? Destroy Israel? Eliminate secular governments in the Muslim world?
Mass mobilization of the US population doesn't help fight Osama bin Laden or his cohorts, or prevent him from "winning" in a number of those situations. How would millions of civilians putting on a uniform and picking up a rifle, or staffing new bomb factories help the West?
Computer: $1299
Broadband: $50
Spelling/grammar flame wars on Slashdot: priceless
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
They have the Matrix. What, you thought *this* was reality?
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
War Games II: the WOPR strikes back
:-)