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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 think my PC can handle it.
The University of Wisconsin has deployed 200 TB of storage for support of similar types of experiments as part of the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin.
Brief article, with pictures:
University of Wisconsin deploys nearly 200TB of Xserve RAID storage (Google cache)
The storage is used for, among other things, particle physics simulations in support of research projects at sites such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. More information on GLOW and its initiatives can be found here.
Text of the above article:
The University of Wisconsin - Madison has deployed 35 5.6TB Xserve RAID storage arrays in a single research installation as part of an ongoing scientific computing initiative.
The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW), a partnership between several research departments at the University of Wisconsin, have installed almost 200TB, or 200,000GB, of Xserve RAID arrays. As a comparison, 200TB of storage is enough to hold 2.75 years of high definition video, 25,000 full length DVD movies, 323,000 CDs, 20 printed collections of the Library of Congress, or over 1000 Wikipedias.
The GLOW storage installation is physically split between the departments of Computer Sciences and High Energy Physics. Each Xserve RAID is attached to a dedicated Linux node running Fedora Core 3 via an Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X Card and is either directly accessed via various mechanisms, such as over the network via gigabit ethernet, or aggregated using tools such as dCache.
The storage is primarily used to act as a holding area for large amounts of data from experiments such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Aside from the GLOW initiative, the university also has Xserve RAID storage systems in use in other areas as well.
Full disclosure: I am the administrator of alienraid.org and am affiliated with the University of Wisconsin.
"25 million megabytes of memory"
man, just when i thought 2 gigs was a lot...
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
Whoa this is slashdot - news for nerds, convert to metric please, :P
or least use Giga or Tera
Just type "FUND" a few hundred times.
Do it before you build anything, because it causes earthquakes.
there's more than one way to do me.
isn't how much memory longhorn need to run?
Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity. -Nikola Telsa
I thought that they really hadn't even figured out how the universe worked. They have stuff like stars that are older than some estimates of the universe's age, and missing matter in the form of dark matter that they can't account for. How are they supposed to simulate the universe, if the model they have is so badly flawed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
#top
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
561 ganesh 13 0 58876 25000000M 1044 S 0 0.7 95.1 68:51 universe
So when will Google Maps be available for this universe?
What if we're in a simulated universe, simulating other universes?
Whoaaa.
Pass the bong, dude.
Now we're going to /. the cosmos.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
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.
Ho Hum ..... If you REALLY want to impress
people, then design a simulation of how
corporate management ( and IT in particular)
thinks and behaves.
Denial is not a river in Egypt
No, i'm sure this machine doesn't extrapolate the universe based off of a piece of fairy cake.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
...with this pocket calculator stuff.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
And if it does, the simulator in the simulated universe simulates other universe?
And if it does, does it include the simulator?
And this simulator...
The simulated universe represents a cube of creation
It represents 4 simultaneous cubes of creation. Dumbass!
Assuming your assumptions and input are correct, of course.
At least this was going around when I was at Berkeley:
NEW OPERATING SYSTEM:
Because so many users have asked for an operating system of even greater capability than VM, IBM announces the Virtual Universe Operating System --- OS/VU.
Running under VU the individual user appears to have not merely a machine of his own, but an entire universe of his own, in which he can set up and take down his own programs, data sets, system networks, personnel and planetary systems. He need only specify the universe he desires, and the OS/VU system generation program (IEHGOD) does the rest. This program resides in SYS1.GODLIB. The minimum time for this function is 6 days of activity and 1 day of review. In conjunction with OS/VU, all system utilities reside in SYS1.MESSIAH. This program has no parms or control cards, as it knows what you want to do when you execute it.
Naturally, the user must have attained a certain degree of sophistication in the data processing field if an efficient utilization of OS/VU is to be achieved. Frequent calls to non-resident galaxies can, for instance, lead to unexpected delays in the execution of a job. Although IBM, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the United States, is working on a program to upgrade the speed of light and thus reduce the overhead of extraterrestrial and metadimensional paging, users must be careful for the present to stay within the laws of physics. IBM must charge an additional fee for violations.
OS/VU will run on any IBM x0xx equipped with the Extended WARP Feature. Rental is 20 million dollars per cpu/nanosecond.
Users should be aware that IBM plans to migrate all existing systems and hardware to OS/VU as soon as our engineers effect one output that is (conceptually) error free. This will give us a base to develop an even more powerful OS, target date 2001, designated as 'Virtual Reality'. OS/VR is planned to allow the user to migrate to totally unreal universes. To aid the user in identifying the difference between 'Virtual Reality' and 'Real Reality', a file containing a linear record of multisensory total records of successive moments of now will be established. It's name will be SYS1.EST.
25TB ain't enough to even hold a single feature film, let alone the universe.
Free Hans!
Don't worry, typing "FUND" does not cause earthquakes. In fact if you do it early enough there is no earth to quake. However does cause 'big bangs', which can be devastating to an established universe.
So let me get this straight. We can put together enough hardware to simulate the universe, YET WE ARE UNABLE TO PREDICT THE FREAKING WEATHER.
Instead, put all those computers together to model the earth's weather and use the laws of physics to tell me if I should take off next Friday to play golf or schedule a trip to Disney in late August. Geez........
Sheesh!
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