Date: Sep. 5, 2001
Link: http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/08/28/p2pwar.html?page=1
Source Author or Organization: Richard Koman, OpenP2P.com

This article is excerpted from an interview by O'Reilly Managing Editor Richard Koman of Michael Macedonia, Chief Scientist and Technical Director for the U.S. Army Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) and an upcoming speaker at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference in Washington, DC.

Buoyed by "tons" of research data that shows simulation training dramatically improves real world performance, the military is taking advantage of advances in hardware (such as 3D graphics power doubling every 12 months, and Pentium processors that should scale to 10 GHz in a few years), consolidation of MIS resources (such as Army Knowledge Online) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking to move battle simulations to the next level.

P2P is attractive for improvements to a quality that gave birth to the Internet in the first place: the survivability of distributed systems. It is also expected to help the military build more effective simulations for less money.

The article describes progress towards a system where trainees will employ wearable computing power and distributed networks to game in shared virtual simulations of real geopolitical hotspots.