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Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster
olePigeon (Wik) writes "MacCentral has an interesting article on a new computer cluster. From the article: 'Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army.'" alset_tech was one of the many readers to point to
CNET's version of the story.
Isn't hypersonic flight research better suited to the Air Force?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What, Duke Nukem Forever still isn't out yet? Hey, maybe such a computer could create Duke Nukem Forever from scratch so I could play it.
for America's Army!
Glad to hear that the Military are going towards simulations to test their new fangled gadgets rather than catapulting chickens and sending poor test pilots on flights that are most likely going to make them sterile (or worse) :)
Apple does have this.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sure the computers only costs $5.8 million, but how much will the screwdrivers cost they use to install everything?
The zdnet version I read earlier said it'd run OS X, at least initially, but they might explore running Red Hat or Yellowdog.
This sounds like a killer system, but I don't follow the performance numbers.
The 1655 CPU cluster is expected to deliver 25 Tflops, while the Virginia Tech machine, with 1,100 CPU's (if I remember properly) is rated at 10 Tflops. What else is different? Are they using a different interconnect? Clever programmers to get closer to peak? Or is it something silly like a journalist switching between peak and measured performance, or between computers and CPU's (assuming dual G5 Xserves)? Or is the G5 Xserve really _that_ much faster than the G5 desktop measures VA Tech was benchmarked with? I _like_ that idea...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
That's not true. The CPU is IBM's but the I/O controllers and other chips are all Apple made.
4 bi ts_1.html
check this InfoWorld comparison of Opteron systems with the XserveG5,
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/18/25FE6
1566 X Server cluster? That should get some decent FPS.
Ohhhh. XServe. My bad.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
They pretty much all go pretty fast through the atmosphere.
Not sure if it helps your math, but the VT cluster had 1100 G5's, with 2 CPU's each for 2200 CPU's.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
my love for Apple and my hatred for using technology for violence.
Oh screw it, that cluster is gonna be awesome! Forget imagining a Beowulf cluster... imagine your frame rate in Doom III!
First.
20fps.
In Doom III.
Evar!
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
"US$5.8 million"
I'm a grunt in the USMC (former computer geek...who would have figured?)
Anyways... I'm about to go *back* to Iraq in September.
The high brass has some f*ed up priorities some times.... the army has $5.8mil to contract out *research* to some company for technology what.... 10-15 years away at the minimum?
Meanwhile the Marine Corps is scraping nickles and dimes to get us basic equipment the army has had for most of a decade.
Hell, when we go to the field to train, we often have to yell "bang! bang!" because we don't get enough (or any) blank rounds for training.
Imagine if they took just ONE Osprey off the project..... maybe then I wouldn't have a hand-me-down-from-the-army m16a2 (does the army use them anymore?)
Implementing the draft doesn't require number-crunching, it requires I/O bandwidth to run database engines.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster You totally misspelled "1337."
"Physics computations and weapons simulations so good looking, you're going to want to lick them." - Steve Jobs
"Uh, we'd advise against that sir." - Army colonel
"But he SAID I could lick them! Ooh, red, yellow and green WMD icons!" - G. W. Bush
If you need me I'll be off in the corner, sobbing over my 0.533 gigahertz G4.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
>> "US$5.8 million"
$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.
This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)
Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.
Kinda hard when you're in the army ;-)
-psy
The zdnet version I read earlier said it'd run OS X, at least initially, but they might explore running Red Hat or Yellowdog.
I have a feeling that as more time goes on, more and more Apple-based clusters will use OS X. Apple continues to optimize the OS. They also continue to add remote administration features (both GUI and command line) while at the same time keeping the BSD-ness of OS X as pure as possible. (OS X is based on NeXTstep and OPENSTEP, so it does have some oddities when compared to "pure" 4.4BSD or Free/Open/Net BSD).
There are also some Apple software cluster technologies (such as Xgrid) but I'm not sure if they're hardcore enough for something of this magnitude. Apple has mainly been aiming their cluster software and marketing towards the small-scale (10 to 100 notes) research groups.
(Translation:
This is...
O
U
T
R
A
G
E
O
U
S
!
After the article about the renderfarm, I was asking myself why people didn't use the blade for factor to build renderfarms and clusters...
I know there aren't available for mac, but I seem to remember Opterons and Xeon blades were the hot topic some month ago, with dual opteron blades and all...
any reason not to use them blades to build a cluster, each blade bay connected to all other, creating a (sic) beowulf or mosix cluster of some sort ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I think I could have made Duke Nukem Forever by now. No need for a supercomputer.
Game... blouses.
The general impression is that the US military has the biggest bucket of money in the world.
My old man was in the Australian Army (30 yrs ago though), and he certainly implied that the equipment that the equipment issued to the US guys in his day beat the crap out of the stuff the Aussies got.
From examples in the parent post, the money is not always flowing down to the guys at the front anymore.
Actually, the ASIC and probably other chips are made in IBM chip plants but they are designed by Apple.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
...But only one mouse button.
:P
I sure as hell hope Steve Jobs threw in an iPod and a BMW to go with it.
"'But he SAID I could lick them! Ooh, red, yellow and green WMD icons!' - G. W. Bush"
I realize this is just a joke, but it's totally out-of-synch with Bush's character. Bush does not ask anybody for permission to do anything. He is not easily distracted. He does not show excitement.
I'm as liberal and anti-Bush as anyone, but your joke doesn't work for me.
...that the Army is buying.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
like the AMD chips....
oh wait...
Not sure if this is a stupid question - but why 1556. It seems like a rather odd number. Is it budget or does this number of nodes work?
Stay tuned for new sig...
As the price of processing power keeps dropping these clusters are getting closer to the magical 100Tflop mark, which is what Ray Kurzweil and others speculate is required to run a human-level AI . Maybe we should start worrying about the computing projects that military isn't announcing.
But wait... how does that fit in with the right-wing-bush-enron-saudi-haliburton conspiracy? The bill cited was sponsored by a bunch of Dems. The only conspiracy I can smell is that a bunch of Dems want the topic of a draft to be out there in the press. Talk of a draft = bad press for the president.
Casual Games/Downloads
How will they be able to get the performance with gig-E instead of the Infiniband? I appreciate that it might work fine for the application (CFD analysis), but I wouldn't think that the benchmarking would bring it to number 2!
Can anybody enlighten me???
I understand that G5s don't support ECC RAM. That is a major limitation meaning that scientific computations will have to do their own error checking in software using redundant calculations.
Zing.
Because the two Democrats who proposed the bills are using it merely to snipe at the administration.
[from MSNBC]
"In the past year, some lawmakers have urged that a draft for military service be reintroduced, most notably New York Rep. Charlie Rangel and South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings, both Democrats, who have sponsored bills to that effect, primarily as a way to protest against war in Iraq. Though both bills (S. 89 and H.R. 163) remain stuck in committeeand Sen. Hollings was unable even to garner any cosponsors for his bill"
The Army/Air Force/Navy neither wants nor needs a draft.
Vector processing. SSE for Intel and AMD, AltiVec for the G5, and 3DNow for AMD all are instruction sets that allow one to manipulate vectors of 4 floats or 2 doubles (or other assortments) as though they are one operand.
I stand corrected. It looks like Xserves do support ECC http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/06xserveg 5.html
Can't imagine they'd run Red Hat seeing as they don't make a PPC version.
Those bills are being pushed by Democrats; if you want to avoid a draft then I suggest you don't vote for Kerry come November.
COLSA is too similar to Cozzano from Interface by Stephen Bury aka Neil Stephenson for my liking. This is a great time to re-read that book.
If you want to avoid more deaths of American soldiers in Iraq (845 so far and counting), then I suggest you don't vote for Bush in November.
One thing to note is that vector processing doesn't help the G5 on the linpack benchmark (what the top 500 list uses). Altivec only helps single precision calculations. Good for games and graphics, but not desirable for many scientific calculations.
It's the fact that the G5 can dispatch two floating point operations per cycle (like the Athlon's fpu) and that it has a fused multiply/add instruction that can be done in 1 cycle. This effectively gives it the ability to do 4 flops/cycle.
So the theoretical peak is given by 1566 xserves * 2 cpus each * 2 GHz * 4 flops/cycle = 25.056 teraflops/s
100 notes
At least it beats a piano.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
The Linpack benchmarks are IIRC, double precision. Since Altivec can't manipulate doubles, it can't account for much of the performance. Instead, the PPC970, like most superscalar processors, can execute multiple instructions at once. The PPC 970 also contains multiple (two?) FP cores, which makes up for Aktivec's deficiencies.
I've don't know if you know anyone over there, but tours of duty in Iraq for almost all troops have been extended, for some multiple times. Clearly they're running kinda thin on troops, if we need a major deployment elsewhere....
From USA today
The 1st Armored Division, which arrived in Baghdad in the first week of May 2003, spent most of the past year in and around the Iraqi capital. Then, just as the division's 20,000 troops were about to head home, they were ordered to race south to counter the bloody insurgency of renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia. The Pentagon extended the division's tour by 90 days, until mid-July.
Bollocks. Switzeland, Iceland have a different way.
Switzerland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. That's how it stayed neutral in the Second World War - even Hitler was afraid to invade the great mountain fortress.
Iceland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. It opted to join the most powerful military alliance in the world.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
In order for Kurzweil's AI to work, it isnt enough to have 100Tflop. Kurzweil based the 100Tflop number on the idea that we would have algorithms available to replace the brain functions such as vision, pattern recognition, etc.. Just using a simple neural simulator would require many orders magnitude more of power to simulate a human brain. We are a long ways from having the needed algorithms (probably 30 years at a mininum).
Torn between my love for Apple and my hatred for using technology for violence.
Spoken like a true tree hugging hippie.
*ducks behind tree*
Given the amount of R&D that the Army does in Huntsville and the fact that this contractor is based there, I'm betting that it's going to be there. Also, if you read the company's press release, they specifically credited U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) for helping get the funding. With his involvement, do you think it would be anywhere except Alabama?
:-)
Of course, since I'm in Birmingham, I'm certainly hoping it's here in the state. Since Windows is so dominant here, this might triple the amount of Mac processing power in Alabama.
Apple should give them X-Plane software as a bundle with this lot - it'll save them having to develop their own simulation! Apparent;y you can use 4 x G5's with X-Plane to yield airline-training quality simulations, so 1566 of them....
nuh uh ... it will have 1566 mouse buttons. duh!
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Might you have read 20 seconds as 20 minutes?
Seriously, here are some results I just got with a few file copying tests:
Powerbook 1400 G3 233Mhz 64MB Ram 1GB hard drive.
14.9MB file 12.5 seconds.
88.9MB folder 1:24 minutes.
Power Tower 180 604 195Mhz 96MB Ram 2GB hard drive.
39.6MB folder 49 seconds.
14.9MB file 13 seconds.
64MB folder 1:53 minutes.
PowerMac 6100 601 60Mhz 72MB Ram 2GB hard drive.
18.6 folder 55 seconds.
14.1 file 11 seconds.
Canada as always beaten the crap out of the US of A ( see your history book ladies of the US ).
"Canada" has been at war with the United States twice - once during the American Revolution and once during the War of 1812. On neither occasion was the United States fighting "Canada", because that nation was not yet founded. It was however fighting the British Army in His Majesty's colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. On both occasions the British Army repelled an American invasion of Canada. On the latter occasion the American army also repelled a British invasion of the western United States from Canada. Your statement is, to say the least, a little simplistic.
Whe have one of the biggest country ( in territory ) with one of the smallest army in number of unit in the world.
Canada is defended by the armed forces and nuclear arsenal of the United States (and, for that matter, the other NATO countries). It is therefore unsurprising that it has a small "army in number of unit".
Whe have the best nuclear reactor and MEDICAL nuclear program in the world but NO NUCLEAR FOR WEAPON program even do whe know how and can build in 30 minutes the best nuke in the world, whe CHOOSED not to.
Setting aside the easy jokes about limited grammatical technology, Canada has not constructed any nuclear weapons because nuclear attacks on Canada would trigger retaliation from the United States. It's not likely that Canada could design and construct a nuclear weapon in "30 minutes the best nuke in the world", but it's certainly clear that any modern industrialized nation could manufacture a nuclear weapon with comparatively little trouble, especially if a substantial nuclear facilities complex is already in place. It's not really obvious what this has to do with being better than anyone else.
Whe have -"NO"- Known enemy.
Well, according to this story reprinted from the National Post, Al-Qaeda has declared that Canada must be destroyed, because it is part of Dar ul-Harb. I can understand the strong desire to want to pretend that everything's just fine, but it should be pointed out that only one side has to agree in order to have a war.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Is this really a supercomputer? Sounds more like a... supercluster to me.
At what point does linking together a bunch of off-the-shelf fully-self-contained PCs become a supercomputer? If doing so is the case, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to link together whitebox machines, much as datacenters (the type that rent servers) tend to use whitebox servers rather than rackmount boxes?
I just feel like the term "supercomputer" is being sullied by so-called supercomputers that are nothing more than a simple cluster. Of course, I'm probably a moron, as I said earlier.
What ever happened to the days when our Army would build their own giant evil super computers?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The true radness in this is how cost effective it is to biuld xserve clusters. Not only will they save lots of money biulding the thing they will save lots of money supporting it. RAD!
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
and dont forget the IDE hard disk...
due to limited expansion space blades aren't as suitable for beefed up cluster nodes as 1u servers are.
my take on the whole apple hpc thing is that it's very hyped up. just like their xserve raid which is pathetic but people think it's a revolutionary new SAN - you pay little and yet you get EMC quality SAN.. yeah right.
ibm could cause intel big troubles with their powerpc blades though... amd is currently hot but let's see how intel will do with the new 64/32 processor..
Haven't we seen this before?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Can anyone with an insight explain how one can come up with 1566 units for the supercomputer? It seems such an odd (as in strange, oh, you know what I mean) number? Is it determined by the budget? The topography of the network? Some magic number?
perhaps you should read Stephen Hayes' book The Connection, or look at the data regarding Saddam/al Qaida. was there a direct 9/11 link? the commission cannot conclude there was, however, you should also read a book called The Third Terrorist by Jayna Davis. There has been a much more than casual relationship between terrorists, of which aQ was a major group, and saddam. like at salman pak where they had a full fuselage of a 707 where terrorists trained for plane/hostage attacks. and now it seems that a high ranking colonel in the Rep guard was also an aQ operative.
there have been 850 or so deaths. hell, we are in world war 3, whether people around here want to believe it or not. in ww2, we lost 850 per day. and rememebr, japan only wanted us out of the pacific, and hitler never had us on his checklist. he wanted land in the east (lebensraum) and wanted peace originally with the brits. (thank God for Churchill!!) we face people who want to impose the extreme sharia on everyone, and want to kill as many americans as possible. i am not downplaying the 850, they are all terrible, however, if we cannot stomach the losses, if we cannot susain the will to fight, and win, the 3000 will be nothing compared to the next attack.
given what bush could have reasonably have known after 9/11, the war in iraq was not only necessary, but mandatory. did he overstate some things, or rely on shaky intel? sure. but what choice did he have? no, containment didn't work (as much as gen. zinni wants to claim it), and given what might happen, anything other than removing saddam, would warrant impeachment. we can only imagine if aQ could have gotten wmd's on those planes.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Actually Switzerland did collaborate with the Nazi's that is how they stayed safe during WWII, not because them Germans were afraid of the Swiss army (laughable at best).
Since every nation needs Switzerland somehow, they have managed to be allowed to "exist." Not because of military might, but rahter due to very clever positioning in the global community, and of course everybody needs the Swiss banking system.
Because IBM sold the Nazi's some census machines that were eventually used to track down and account for all the Jews in their country.
Technology by itself doesn't have any principals attached to it... It's end usage is up to humanity to figure out.
There is a real possibility of a targeted draft - has been for years.
As the military continues to become more high-tech it takes a greater and greater level of techinical skills to operate, especially at command centers. At some point it is going to become difficult to recuit those people (simply put, if 15% of the population has - or is capable of - the technical skills and the military needs 50% of it's troop to have them they must come from someplace).
I do not think it is in the next few years. But since sometime in the 90's (can't really specify a single point in time) it has been a possibility. Any large theater we may have to get invovled in may require this.
Though this has little to do with the current Iraq war and more to do with the shift the military has been taking.
But yes, as to what the vast majority of people refer to the "upcoming draft", it is what a few democrats have discussed as a talking point and a protest against the war. Others have picked up on it and it has changed to "Bush wants a draft". The military still turns down a certain percentage of the volunteers it recieves as they consider themselfs over staffed - especially in the realm of grunts as they need educated technical skills (and grunts are what armchair or retired generals are moaning about not having enough of). There will be no general draft until that is no longer true.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I think the joke taps into the old image of boy-Bush and Daddy Cheney (played here by the colonel) who makes all the decisions in the house and keeps the boy out of trouble and looking presentable. Maybe you're too anti-Bush to get it. It requires seeing Bush as somebody who's not inherently evil, only because he is borderline retarded. He just gets manipulated into doing evil, but all he really wants is to play with trains and baseball cards, and shoot up "bad guys."
Yeah, but then you'd have to wait another year for the Mac version.
Yes they do. They've had it for a few years. But they've never pushed it very energetically.
We dual citizens don't like it.
From all the places in the world, you chose Slashdot to divulge you have details of a military project that's most likely protected with NDA's so thick you could probably climb to the moon if you stacked it all into one pile.
:)
Apparently rocket science doesn't take too much common sense.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
I'd much rather the Army buy a new computer than let the Federal gov't try to get healthcare working.
Did you see the enormous cock-up that was the Medicare drug benefit? Multiply that by about a zillion, and you'd see the goat rodeo that would be socialized medicine in America.
And you can say goodbye to your cheap drugs when that happens, Mr. Canadian.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'm an old style liberal, and I agree with you. If you can absolutely kick anyone's ass, especially if you can kick two or three or more asses in different parts of the world, then it's highly doubtful that any other nation-state is going to attack you or your friends. Thus, peace, if you are a peace loving nation.
However, if you are not a peace loving nation, or if your peace loving nation is in the hands of war mongers, you're not going to have peace, obviously. Instead, you will have "pre-emptive" war in the name of peace, since wars of conquest are considered bad manners these days.
Lastly, there is asymetric warfare, which some will remember was put to great use in Viet Nam by the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). Without getting into the underlying causes, today you have non-nation-state groups who use many of the same principles of asymetric warfare.
As I said, I agree with your basic concept, but there is more to it than simply peace through might.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
If you know of a better way to make more virgins, I'd like to hear it.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
That's a recent phenominon as a result of a foreign private interest looking to have public healthcare de-regulated. Much of what was publically funded before has become private so the system as it exists here in Canada presently is in transition. Over the last term of provincial government the public system was large dismantled in a effort to make it appear broken. Yet despite a reduciton of 6 billion dollars in funding healthcare here still works. The majority of people going to the USA were getting medical imaging done not major surgeries. Even in the USA diagnostics and imaging are expensive.
I wrote this post in haste orginally and apologise for the tone. To clarify witout getting too much further off topic private and public systems of healthcare tend not to co-exist well in the Canadian experience. For us in the industry it's well known that the influence from the US is a major political power even here. It makes us awfully resentful when companies from abroad railroad us by pressuring government to further cut funding in the face of increasing demand. Well of course we're going to start failing. Then to see the US defense budget as a blueprint for my country to come? No wonder we're more resentful than ever of our neighbours to the south. Our sovereignty has always been regarded as some sort of quaint and primitive custom.
_nfotxn
The swiss have banks, and they know how to use them. How would Hitler wage his war if he couldn't buy material from neutral states with freely convertible swiss currency?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Of course no conversation of really big guns can be complete without a link to Gerry Bull. Kinda like Werner von Brahm for guns.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Wow. I'm a canajun pacifist, eh, but that was just ridiculous. (Obviously you're ESL, otherwise I'd pick on your grammar too. Umm, english is NOT your first language, right? Please tell me I'm right.)
Some of the residents who predated Confederation joined with British forces to repel U.S. invasions (on the very spot on which I type, actually), but whatever. The CANDU system is not proven to be the 'best' program in the world, it has its own problems. We participate in many instances of international belligerence that have, in fact, made us enemies to various jihad-driven factions. And, while we don't make nuclear weapons, we'll happily supply the raw materials to those who do--and then rely on their protection.
Our military is small because it's relatively pointless as presently conceived: either use it for overseas operations--the so-called 'peacekeeping' missions or collaborating with the emerging meta-empire(s), or defend ourselves from what, the USA? If they found sufficient reason to roll across the border, what are we going to do about it in our present state of preparation?
You're right however about violence begetting violence, even if only deferred. The ones on top just don't get that, and then wonder why they're hated...
Damn those pesky terrorists
Imagine a beowulf c. . . gah nevermind.
Actually, National Public Radio reported this morning that the "high ranking colonel in the Rep guard was also an aQ operative" was in fact merely a high-ranking colonel in the Republican Guard who shared the same common name as an al-Qaeda operative. The CIA had long since dismissed the connection, but one of the (Republican) members of the 9-11 council inexplicably started quoting it as revolutionary new intelligence this week.
Maybe Steve is going to announce that they are purchasing a new model that uses 2.5 Ghz G5s instead of the current 2 Ghz G5s. There is plenty of room inside the XServes to squeeze a liquid cooling system as well.
Ah, found a link to the story here.
Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.
I've got an older M392A2 spin stabilized sabot round in my office. Heavier than it looks :^)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
ah yes, the same cia that missed 9/11, wmd's, etc., gets this one right. i know that half that part of the world is named muhammad, and that names might be common, but, i'm still waiting on this one. there is more than just a name. there are also receipts for money to ansar al islam and others. people who would have us believe that there is no saddam/aQ link have to follow this logic.
aQ was in Pakistan, Afghaninstan, Malaysia, Phillipines, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, even upstate New York and southern florida, but no aQ in Iraq. aQ cut deals with the secular Pakistani gov't, are now operating in secular Syria, got funding from the Saudis (secular), but never cut a deal with the man who hates america as much as they did. hmmm...makes sense to me. and don't forget, hexbollah is iran backed through syria, a shiite terrorist group, receiving money and support from secular sunni syria. those who want to destroy bush are doing the same thing the brits and french did in 1937. like hitler, the jihadists aren't going away.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This is is nice, but why 1655, this is strange, would it be easier to have 1700 They measure the capacity not in Tflops anyway, in cubic acres...
Is the Army also going to hire Jonathon Ives to design the look of the hypersonic misiles?
No, actually the reasoning behind the deal has to do with Apple's huge thirst for titanium and aluminum for their cases. The army has graciously offered to let Apple engineers scavenge the 'ghost yards' of retired aircraft for metal in exchange for a supercluster.
Also, the army is keen on developing Apple's 'firewire' into a viable weapons platform, the cables are expected to be 24 inches in diameter and spew 8000 trilobits of flaming death per second.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
According to my former roomate, You had it good. He is a flight nurse with the Air Reserve and he only got the Dam Revolver!!! I told him, one of my friends is a survivalist nut, and I could have sent him some hardware and some better armor if he just asked. He came back in July (2 months after his unit commanders came back, yes he was forgotten). But now he has just been told he is going to Volenteer to go back (which he does not want to do, of course). Maybe I'll be sending over a care package anyway... Bob
MacOSX, because making *NIX better is a lot better than waiting for Micro$loth to fix Windows
Hah!
If you've ever dealt with the US government, you'd know that you'd NOT want them running your healthcare!
Case in point: last friday I was supposed to receive a direct deposit from the government for my salary.
I never got paid.
The reason? For some unknown reason the routing number was switched to something completely different. My bank is Wells Fargo (I live on the west coast of the US), and my direct deposits have gone to my account just fine for as long as I've worked for the government. But this last Friday, my direct deposit got direct deposited to some bank in BOSTON.
Yes. You read that correctly, BOSTON.
The government has NO CLUE how, or why the routing number got switched to something else. Supposedly once you fill out the direct deposit form, it stays that way in the computer system. And no, the routing numbers weren't even CLOSE. The routing numbers on the east coast start low and they get higher as you move west. There is a huge difference from 1250 to 0110.
And you want me to trust the government with my healthcare? The same government that will fix your problem but take at least a month when they say a day? (Or they say a week and they mean a year?)
If that's the case, can I assist you with some financial planning services?
Republicans: party of big gov't
Democrats: party of really big gov't
Correction:
Democrats: party of stupid gov't
Republicans: party of really stupid gov't
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Apple already invented it.
It was known as the "G4 Cube."
Ba-boom!
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the fish, I hear it's great.
Nastran
Hypermesh
Abaqus
Fluent
Fluent doesn't want to support Apple OS X, yet they will support FujitsuPrimepower? I wonder how many seats they sell to Fujitsu customers and how many more seats they could sell if they woke up and ported to OS X with X11.
HPItaniumHP-UX 11i v1.6 (11.22)
HPPA 8x00HP-UX 11.0
HPPA-RISCHP-UX 11i (11.11)
HPAlphaTru64Unix 5.0A, 5.1
HPAlphaTru64Unix 5.1A
IBMPower3AIX 4.3.3
IBMPower3AIX 5.1
IBMPower4AIX 5.1
SGIR10000 R12000 R14000IRIX 6.5
SGIAltix-ItaniumLinux Red Hat: 7.2
SUNUltraSolaris 8
SUNUltraSolaris 9
FujitsuPrimepowerSolaris 8
LinuxItaniumRed Hat: 2.1AS
LinuxPentium/XeonRed Hat: 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
LinuxPentium/XeonRed Hat: 8.0
LinuxPentium/XeonSuSE: 7.2
LinuxPentium/XeonSuSE: 7.3, 8.0
LinuxAthlonRed Hat:7.3
LinuxAthlonRed Hat: 8.0
LinuxAthlonSuSE: 7.2, 7.3, 8.0
LinuxOpteronSuSE: SLES8
WindowsPentium/Xeon2000, XP
WindowsPentium/XeonNT 4.0
WindowsAthlon2000, XP
No public healthcare yet defense contracts like this aren't a big deal?
Yes, because government is about coercion - just think about what the word "government" means. Even in the case of "public" healthcare what makes it "public" is that if you as an individual don't want to pay into the system men with weapons will make you. If you refuse to pay in they will imprison you, if you resist them they will shoot you. All government action flows from the barrel of a gun.
There are some who think that the only justification for violence is self-defense and that the violence implicit in all government action is only legitimate as an expression of our collective right of self-defense. Anything beyond that is immoral, it is using violence to impose our collective will on others who pose no threat to us. In this view paying for a military is legitimate (as long as that military is used for self-defense) while public healthcare is always immoral - the use of violence to compel others to do what we think they should rather than what they choose themselves to do.
I've asked this question before and been modded as troll, but I'm serious: Is Apple the new Sun? It seems that while Apple doesn't have the broad product line that Sun does on the high-end server market, they are nonetheless making inroads into that very market. Further, Apple is sleek and sexy and has a lot of goodwill going for it, whereas Sun mostly brings out ambivalence.
I'm not saying they are direct competitors, but they are competitors in at least some respects. And it seems that Apple is profiting from sales of its products whereas Sun's biggest revenue inflow recently has been its $1b settlement with Microsoft, not from its product lines.
It is my understanding that the Air Force is also technically part of the Army (although with its own ceremonial, normally, Secretary). If you look up rank insignias, Congress can authorize a 5-star Admiral or General in wartime, but not Marine or Air Force, because technically the Marines are part of the Navy and the Air Force is part of the Army...
The reason for this, to my understanding, is that the Constitution establishes that the President is the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy (when called up from the state militias of course)...
If you actually had another military, it wouldn't have a Civilian Commander... Therefore, their are four major branches, but Constituionally, there are two.
That's my understanding at least.
Alex
If you get a chance you can read an article on E-Commerce news. The market for OS X users in engineering, research and defense in growing. Its just a matter of time for the marketing and sales folks to realize that.
The U.S. is and has been an empire that is seeking to exert effective control over every valuable resource and every person on the planet. They exert force to this end using a wide range of instruments: Wal-Mart, Wall St., the World Bank, the G8, the WTO, the UN Security council, the CIA, USAID and other foreign "aid" programs, all the way to cruise missile strikes, threats of nuclear attack and direct military conquest and occupation.
This global empire even has a name: it goes by the grand moniker "Our Interests" (i.e. "we must bomb these civilians to protect our interests").
This may seem a glorious adventure and noble cause to you, but to the millions whose lives are diminished or destroyed by this aggression, I suspect it looks simply greedy, self serving and evil.
When one is being harmed, one attempts to abate that harm. The more we harm people, the more they fight back. Why is that so hard to understand?
When our empire has blocked all legitimate avenues for fighting back against its acts (i.e. political, economic, or military) the only remaining options are illegitimate, such as terrorism and sabotage.
Or do you expect people to simply acquiesce to whatever conditions we feel like imposing on them? Should people be expected to surrender their lives, well being, economic opportunities and human dignity to the caprices of the hungry empire? Should they be good little slaves and "set on the front porch singing spirituals" while we count the swag?
What the fuck would you do, were the shoe on the other foot? I suspect you would fight for your rights, your way of life and your family in any way you had to. That is what human beings do! So don't try to cast it as evil when other people do it.
If you really want to reduce terrorism against the U.S., a great place to start would be to take our foot off the neck of the rest of the world. We spend about 50% of our federal budget on the military (counting veterans benefits and interest on military-related debt) and have bases in 180 countries. We sell more arms than any other country, and have the largest stockpiles of WMDs of any country. We routinely and knowingly kill civilians with our "targetted strikes", such as the one last week that killed 22 (most of them women and children) in a residential neighborhood in Iraq where they "suspected" a resistance leader might happen to be (he wasn't).
If we would stop trying to have it all our way and end the dirty dealing and (dare I say it) terrorism that we effect daily, I believe that anti-U.S. terrorism would become an insignificant problem (it would not be completely eliminated, any more than disease, crime, or child abuse could ever be completely eliminated).
America is a rich land blessed with many advantages. We can live well and actually BE the kind of beacon for the rest of the world that we like to say we are, if we can get our masters in Washington and Wall St. give up on their sick dream of world empire.
The false-patriot warmongers like to say that our wars are to protect our freedom and our way of life. But actually, I can think of no more certain way to destroy the real promise of this country and the hopes of its citizens than to continue this ever-accelerating rush to empire by force. To fight them and their misguided agenda is the finest form of patriotism.
Our med-evac unit was originally planned to be within an Army or Marine firebase, ala Vietnam. Desert Storm turned into such a fast moving battle that we were kinda' left hanging out on our own. We were supposed to only have the revolvers but once it became clear that we were going to be responsible for sight security, food, power, etc, we all donned multiple hats. don't know just where they found the M-16's for us but one would think that they hadn't seen the light of day since 1966.
I got out about a year after Desert Storm and haven't heard how they changed the tactics for use of the Air Evac units.
I drank what? -- Socrates
"used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight"
oh please. bullets or rails, eitherway thats about the extent of the hypersonic flight research the air force is doing.
fuckin mods.
Come one, we all know that they're really just trying to create a reality distortion field powerful enough to annihilate all of America's enemies.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
hypersonic projectiles came along before flight. an austrailian university launched the first hypersonic off of a specially modified artillery shell. as it is almost like those kinetic energy projectiles the navy is developing this would be a nice, land-based complement
You sure as hell better be giving some of it back to help people who aren't able to pull the big bucks in through their jobs.
I'm a middle class person, and I do give a sizable percentage of my income to charities. I'd be able to give a hell of a lot more if I weren't being taxed at confiscatory rates. Moreover, I'm very selective about the charities I give to; they must have an efficiency of at least 90% (i.e., at least 90 cents of every dollar actually reaches the needy beneficiaries, and less than 10 cents goes toward administrative overhead or fundraising). Government "entitlement" programs are notoriously inefficient: less than 10% reaches the persons the programs were designed to help.
An example of how it would work: a government program for homeless persons has its budget cut by $1000. We'll be generous and say that results in an actual reduction of benefits to homeless persons of $100. That $1000 is refunded to me. I keep $800 for myself, and donate the other $200 to a private charity that helps the homeless. Due to its 90% efficiency, that results in a $180 increase in benefits to homeless persons -- a net increase of $80.
I'm better off and so are the homeless. The only loser is the inefficient government bureaucracy that never deserved the money in the first place.
I'm better off spiritually, too. True acts of charity are voluntary -- unlike the contributions I am forced to make to government "entitlement" programs.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That is going to be one sweete machine!
As a Canadian, I find this embarrassing.
You're out of the club. Please pack your things and move out immediately. I don't care where you go, though I hear Iraq is nice this time of year.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Because I haven't seen any 2000+ CPU opteron clusters that are ranked (or are expected to be ranked) in the top 5 of all supercomputers on the planet for performance.
[[your clue] release]
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2