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:For some reason ....

[tardibear]

You can legislate morally you can't legislate morallity

I can't disagree because there's no such thing as morallity. Did you mean morality?

Re:Hmm

[nofx_3]

Actually I believe if MS were to build a pocket gaiming system the would name it something like XpocketPC and it'd probably just be a pocket PC device with a souped up graphics proc and ram, probably with sd or some sort of card for games. This would make it easy, just port directX over and they have a whole environment. Also they would need to change the layout from the standard devices to something a little more gaming friendly.

-kaplanfx

Cooking the dog

[Tandoori Haggis]

I had this novel idea - how to get hot women to come up to you in the street and do something really cool!

Use flexible architecture to produce a dog jacket, that allows the hound to behave more or less normally. You could go looking for wi-fi hot spots and get your computer to play chess with other computers, while you walk the dog.

Then I realised, two things:

1. The dog would cook
2. I don't have a dog

Don't laugh. Packet loss could happen to any one.