Called the Roadrunner, it is built from 13,000 Cell processors and 7,000 AMD processors and runs 1000 trillion calculations a second (twice as fast as the previous).

From the article: 

A spokesperson for the lab said that RoadRunner's daily output was equivalent to each of the 6 billion people on earth using a calculator to crunch numbers for 24 hours a day for 46 years.

"Roadrunner will be used by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to perform calculations that vastly improve the ability to certify that the US nuclear weapons stockpile is reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests," the department said in a statement.

"Roadrunner will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields," it added.

http://technology.newscientist.com/arti … chips.html

Cell != PS3

That would be cool if it were a real gaming system, but the cost of removing heat would easily exceed my income or even the median income. I wonder how a simulation of an atomic explosion works...do they make a virtual collection of plutonium or uranium weapon grade isotopes and then account for the movement of every atom, including those in the atmosphere and surrounding material? I don't think they can do that, simply because the amount of atoms in just a cubic meter far exceeds the calculations per second. I would guess they simulate energy release, rather than the movement of atoms. By knowing what a certain amount of dynamite does, they can extrapolate and guess what 1 million tons of it might do. I really don't know, though. Hehe.

I would say "someone found a use for the PS3?" but that might agitate some people so I won't. Doh!

limited 90 day warranty included...

I wonder if that computer has software that's actually worth playing.

Used to certify our nuclear weapon stockpiles?

What good is that shit, we're idiots for keeping hundreds of nuke warheads just sitting around in storage anyways.  We're gonna accidentially blow OURSELVES up one of these days...

You can't hug your children with Nuclear arms. Well, maybe after judgment day due to the nuclear fallout.

But seriously, one nuke is one nuke too many.

It's largely left over from the Cold War. If we didn't make those weapons, then I could have been typing this in Russian right now. Anyway, you can really blame Hitler for this mess. We were terrified he was going to make a nuke before us, so that's why we scrambled so quickly to make one. And once we saw what they could do, well, we had to make more. The last thing you want to happen is for your neighbor to have more nukes than you have.

But...if not for those nukes....this website would not exist. The internet (known as the 'arpanet' intially) was made because of nuclear weapons. The Pentagon wanted a communication infrastructure that could keep cities connected in the event we were bombed by the Russians. This internet is the end result of that idea. (It was the physicists that changed the name to 'internet'.)

The danger from nukes is not from accidental detonations, but from leaks into the environment. Plutonium isn't going anywhere for a very long time. I would guess that future societies will figure out how to get rid of it; the best we can do is store it.

The thought of depending on some unknown (but futuristic!) technology to bail us out (post mortem!) by making our current messes magically disappear is ridiculous. 

It's the equivalent of saying "Jesus will solve everything sometime" and walking away.

As for the cold war fears that started the nuke race, beating Hitler to making ONE of them first is a lot different than cranking out HUNDREDS of them, we got waaaay too carried away.

We're the only country crazy enough to have actually USED nuclear weapons as an offensive attack, yet we are still allowed to store a ton of them in our own backyard.   Not a great strategy.

If you have a solution to the problem, then you'll win the Nobel Prize. No one knows how to get rid of plutonium, other than burying it for future generations to deal with. You need to research plutonium and learn about radiation. As I said, the plutonium isn't going anywhere for a very long time. I actually do have an idea, but I'm not sure if it would be financially feasible. It could cost more than the amount of money available on the planet. My idea is that you could use carbon nanofibers and build a string into space, from the surface of the Earth, and use it like a rope to haul the dangerous material into space. It would work like a conveyor belt. From there, I suppose we could store it on the Moon, or send it into interstellar space. You can't use rockets to haul the stuff off the planet, because if one went boom!, then we'd have a real mess to clean up.

Sure, here's one that the Bush administration would think of....  [comedy!]

Since the risks are from hazardous material seeping out into the US-soil that the nukes are buried under, let's go bury them in OTHER countries' soil, so it can contaminate THEM instead of us!

We'd win the war-on-terror by shipping all our old nukes to a middle eastern country and burying them to rot over there, then claim it was some secret-stash of Saddam as a cover up!!

Take that Al-Quaida, Mission Accomplished!! [end comedy!]

ARPANET was created so that scholars and institutions (largely funded by the DoD) could exchange information/resources more easily for their research. I have no idea where you got your information. That may have been why the DoD want it created, but it is not the real reason it came into being.

Hey, you stole that from *spoiler* ]Mega Man X8. It doesn't make any more sense in that game either.

You're right. ARPANET was initially conceived to link up scientists and universities. However, it was modified to handle e-mail. E-mail was created so scientists could communicate during and after a nuclear war. Refer to pages 47-48 of Visions, by Michio Kaku. I got confused because I didn't know that 'e-mail' and the 'internet' are 2 different things. It appears I have more research to do. Do you have a good link explaining why they are not the same thing?

I've never played that; I had heard of the idea from Arthur C. Clarke. I just changed it to a conveyor belt because it seems cheaper than making an elevator.

Creating hundreds of them is how we eventually overcame the Soviet Union - by bankrupting them when they couldn't keep up in the arms race. I'm sure it seemed like an awesome idea at the time. And it could very well have been.

Of course I agree having them all lying around is just some tragedy waiting to happen, but we'll either be able to dismantle them safely one day or we won't. I'm not going to keep myself awake in a cold sweat at night wondering. I'm also quite glad I'm not typing in Russian right now!

P.S. If there's a nuclear accident, I pray to $deity I'm killed in the blast and not months or years later from radiation sickness. (Oh God, I'm thinking of that book "On the Beach" now.)

Gee, now, maybe they can actually get some games out on the PS3 that're worth playing? (Sigh) Sony might as well just go for governmental and institutional customers from now on. If the PS3 is really that powerful, just think what horrors some hacker-minded genius punk might be able to pull off?

Jodo's right though; ARPAnet was originally created as a military communication tool; any basic CIS class you could possibly have, that's the first thing they tell you. Unless of course, the class is for shit.

I'm pretty sure our nukes are safely stored away in silos, where they can't leak  into the environment, or blow up anybody near by; that's what deserts are for: storing away our stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Agreed. I'm much more worried about Russia's stockpile than ours.

Doubly agreed.

Has everyone missed Angela's thread about Metal Gear Solid 4? <sarcasm>