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 think my PC can handle it.
"25 million megabytes of memory"
man, just when i thought 2 gigs was a lot...
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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.
I'm pretty sure that they're talking about RAM. And yes, 23 terrabytes of RAM is a ton.
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
#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.
No, they don't. This has happened a few times in the past, e.g., when they didn't know about the different populations of stars, but currently there isn't an age problem.
We don't know what dark matter is, but we know enough about its gravitational properties -- that's why it was postulated to exist, after all -- to simulate its effects on these scales.
The models we have are not as badly flawed as you think they are. But even if they are flawed, that's the point of the simulation: to test the validity of the model. If the simulation's results don't agree with observations, then that tells us about where the model fails.
Welcome to science, where no matter how far you come along, there's always a ways more to go. Today's models are flawed, but not nearly as much as yesterday's. And even if the Dark Matter mysteries or older-than-time star mysteries are resolved, I'm sure there will be other mysteries we have yet to discover. These simulations are a part of that process.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
That's confirmed in page 18 of their paper: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0504/05040
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).
...with this pocket calculator stuff.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.