Slashdot Mirror
Simulated Universe
anonymous lion writes "A story in the Guardian Unlimited reports on The Millennium Simulation saying that it is 'the biggest exercise of its kind'. It required 25 million megabytes of memory to take our universe's initial conditions along with the known laws of physics to create this simulated universe." From the article: "The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now."
I always though that a computer large enough to handle a simulation of the universe would allow us to predict the future, even at individual level if the simulation was advanced enough.
And then I realized that the smallest simulation of the universe would probably be the size of the universe.
It got very confusing at that point.
Jeez.
Yeah, I can point out more that that too in our facilities.
After all, UW-Madison is one of the largest research universities in the world.
The point is that:
- They were talking about 25TB of disk, not RAM
- 200TB in a single installation for a single project is hardly "peanuts"; it's actually quite a bit by enterprise storage standards, but that's neither here nor there
- Oracle is doing press releases on things like using *50 TB* of disk for a project
- 200TB of Xserve RAIDs in one place is, I believe, the largest Xserve RAID installation at a single site (save perhaps Apple), and that was really the thrust of the article anyway
So, even if you do see 200TB of disk as "peanuts", then 25TB of disk is a peanut shell fragment. The comparison is still apt because the submission and the press release and articles are talking about 25TB of disk like it's a shitload, and I'm just pointing out that it's not in this environment (particle physics).