Slashdot Mirror
IBM and LLNL Scientists Show How Stuff Breaks
Maxim writes: "An unprecedented billion-atom calculation has enabled a team of IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists to demonstrate a major advance in using supercomputers to simulate the strength of materials.
Check out the video."
First, whenever someone says "simulation," I immediately think "games." Call it instinct or hypnosis (or maybe both!), but it's just a gut reaction for me. I mean, billions of atoms. We're talking physics so realistic that the holodeck might not be so far off! Of course, it may be some time until graphics catch up with this (LOL), but I think we're all in for a treat.
Next of all is Science. Imagine the cost savings when full physics experiments can be carried out with computers! Plus you avoid all of the danger normally associated with Science (i.e., the Frankenstein complex). The implications for astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, geneology, engineering, geography, and anthropology boggle the mind.
Finally, I think we will finally start to get some answers. One of the biggest barriers to creating the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything (commonly believed to be a combo of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics...not an easy feat) has been the limitations of human reason. On the other hand, computers (which are very good at logical reasoning) lacked the firepower to handle these huge models. If this signifies the breaking down of these barriers (and I think it does), then we might finally get things figured out.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
"Stuff" breaks when you put, on Slashdot, a link to a 63Mb movie.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination so take my ramblings with a grain of salt.
:). How accurate can this be? Or is it because any forces within the atoms have no effect on the end result of the breaking of the cube?
It seems to me that there is a danger in relying too much on simulations. The particle physics has not been fully understood. Simulating how atoms are interacting is great but does the simulation take into account that atoms are made up of other things? There are other forces at work there (I heard
Taking this further, can the simulation show something that isn't expected? In other words can the simulation show an effect such that it was not conceivable? I think not. It can only slow down and reveal a known process right? Otherwise it would theoretically be possible to build an atom level model of the world and speed it up to see what happens. So there is the problem of the computers being unable to come up with anything new.
The second problem is that the computers in the end depend on a binary decision: 0 or 1. Can atoms on their lowest level be reduced to components of 0 or 1? Or are they infinitely reducable?
Anyway, going back to the article I think it's great. I can wait for the new SuperGlue (concrete in less than a second!)
d.
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
I am an undergraduate at Cornell University, and I use the Velocity Cluster, the largest cluster of Windows boxes in the world. It's been mentioned on slashdot before, and the system there is actually pretty cool. Anyways, I had remembered seeing that Cornell, in partnership with several other universities, was doing something very similar to this.
The page about the Cornell Computational Materials Institute can be found here.
There's some pretty nifty stuff going on with that... crack propagation is an especially important problem in materials science, and it's nice to see that these large computers can be used to help solve it.
You're all forgetting a little something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
There will always be non-determinism on the atomic/quantum level involved because of it, and makes it impossible to fully simulate and predict effects with *100% certainty( since you don't know how the atoms are going to behave, wrt their position, and momentum.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.