Simulating the Universe with a zBox

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the University of Zurich predict that our galaxy is filled with a quadrillion clouds of dark matter with the mass of the Earth and size of the solar system. The results in this weeks journal Nature, also covered in Astronomy magazine, were made using a six month calculation on hundreds of processors of a self-built supercomputer, the zBox. This novel machine is a high density cube of processors cooled by a central airflow system. I like the initial back of an envelope design. Apparently, one of these ghostly dark matter haloes passes through the solar system every few thousand years leaving a trail of high energy gamma ray photons."

Comments

Re:Dark matter passing through the solar system

[flyingsquid]

So one of these dark matter clouds may pass through the solar system every few thousand years? Have they taken the next step and hypothesized that such an event could account for major climate changes? Like the event that killed off the dinosaurs?

It'd be interesting if these things could be tied to mass extinctions, but these occur much more rarely than every few thousand years. And unless these clouds can account for high levels of iridium, shocked quartz, melt glass, and a hundred-mile impact crater in Mexico, it's not terribly likely they account for the dinosaur extinction.

6 Months?

[Dan East]

If the computer ran for 6 months straight using 1.8GHz processors, couldn't they have waited several months and utilized newer CPUs running at double the speed, halving the computation time?

Regarding their design, I'm somewhat surprised they used an individual power supply for each board. It seems there would be more efficient and smaller power systems available that could power multiple boards at once. It looks like a quarter of the volume of the computer is comprised of power supplies. Plus all that extra heat is thrown into the mix too.

Dan East