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Creating a Black Hole With OpenGL
There's a cool article on O'Reilly Net concerning using 3D graphic software to emulate black holes. Interesting article - with a lot of information about OpenGL and what you can do.
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This brings up an interesting idea of applying the horsepower of video cards to other purposes. A modern 3D accellerator is basically a dedicated co-processor with it's own RAM that's optimized to do specific math tasks really, really fast.
I wonder if there are any serious scientific applications that could use this. If you are running a Beowulf cluster, you could possibly improve the performance of the entire cluster very easily. Of course, it would require custom software, but then Beowulf already needs that anyway.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Why is it a story on Slashdot?
---- SIGFPE
Sean
Maw! Get me that NT CD, I want implosions now, damnit.
cperciva, have you been giving yourself mod points?
Basically, you create particle accelerators to prove that the nature actually acts the way our mathematical models presume it does...running simulations on a 3D card really doesn't prove anything as it will always work after our mathematical models...after all humans program it!
We have no way of knowing for absolutely sure that black holdes works the way the 3D cards say...I once read that you could travel through dimensions/time through a black hole. I'm not saying you can, I'm saying thatyou certainly can't prove it (or the opposite) by programming in OpenGL.
// Clear the background to black to simulate the emptiness of space
glClearColor( 0, 0, 0, 0 );
glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT );
// This accurately models the black-hole not emitting any light
glColor3f( 0, 0, 0 );
// Draws the boundary of the black hole
glutSolidSphere( 1, 10, 10 );
Come on, this is just a classical gravitational model piped into an OpenGL model. There are no visual distortion caused by the black hole, and no relativistic physics anywhere.
If you're going to call it a black hole simulation, do it right. Otherwise, call it a solar system simulation.
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I already have a black hole simulator on my desktop. It's called a computer, defined as a black hole in the desktop which continually sucks money out of my wallet, at the speed of light, and is never seen again. I assume done there is a mass of pennies so dense that very few practical value rays fail to escape. Such is a hobby...
The logical path for this is to: Laptop, palm and then some pocket computer which could directly interface to the wallet and shorten the path the money has to move.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why do Slashdot keep posting stuff like this on computer graphics? Any one how reads openGL.org knows that there are about a zillion particle demos out there.
Some time ago there was a story about AGP 8X and who ever wrote the story asked why we would need it since we already got firewire.... Don't even know were to start complaining about that one.
And its not like there hasn't been any graphics storys to cover. The advancements in hardware accelerated programmable shades has fundamentally changed the way people think of graphics hardware, softimageXSI for Linux, Linux on onyx3, the alternative to openGL SMASH, rendering whit natural light, new 3D displays....the list goes on and on.
I think that slashdot is one of the greatest sites on the net but every time i read some thing regarding my area of expertise that is wrong I start to question the credibility of slashdot on areas i don't know much about.
Please, if you what to cover graphics please do so, but get some one who works whit graphics to do it. A "ask slashdot" on how to improve the site may also be a good idea.
Sorry about the rant, i just could not get my fingers of the keyboard.
...I didn't think OpenGL sucked _that_ much.
The humor comes from noting that opengl.org, the official OpenGL website, refers to the Mesa 3D library as "Mesa OpenGL". Which, according to their own rules, they're not supposed to do...
Upon hearing this news at Redmond, a Microsoft PR person had this to say...
"It's good to hear that technology had gone so far forward, but we should remind you that Mircrosoft is still at the head of innovation. So OpenGL can simulate a black hole, DirectX has sucked that hard for quite some time."
(Obligitory, I know.)
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I would argue that Hawking IS an explorer--more so than a non-theoretician. If you believe (as I do) that the laws of physics (and especially of mathematics) are REAL in the platonic, idealistic sense then what Hawking does is exploration. He's certainly not an inventor...
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Linux MAPI Server!
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http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
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3D APIs get talked about as if they're doing all the work. OpenGL and Direct3D are just that--APIs--and there's nothing magical about them. It's not like OpenGL is doing the "creating" here. It's just being used for the back-end polygon rendering. That's it. The rest of the code has nothing to do with OpenGL.
One other thing I'd like to add while I'm here is that in a typical 3D game, only about 2-5% of the code involves 3D API calls. Two to five percent. There's a consistent myth that OpenGL rendering is the bulk of most 3D games and such, which is certainly not even close to true.