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Simulating Supernovae with Graphics Cards

Posted by timothy on from the gforce-9-from-outer-space dept.

astroboy writes "As graphics cards get more powerful, Los Alamos and Utah scientists have developed a package, Scout, to use those usually-languishing FLOPs to do simulations, and to visualize of them on the on the run. As an example, they have released movie of part of the evolution of a core-collapse supernovae"

85 comments

  1. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Funny


    From TFA:


    To make the technology much more powerful, McCormick is working on a version of Scout that will work when several computers are linked together.

    I guess they can.

    ^_^
    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 1

      How is this a troll? My guess is someone has seen the joke 500 times, but doesn't realize what it means.

      +1 funny or +1 informative.

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    2. Re:Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? by Isauq · · Score: 1

      My folding stats would certainly improve...

      --
      RTFM
  2. Haven't they learned... by BalorTFL · · Score: 1

    ...not to directly link to movies in the article yet? I predict their site's gonna do a little core-collapsing of its own in the next few minutes...

    1. Re:Haven't they learned... by moonka · · Score: 1

      Best movie of the year! Robert Ebert gives it 2 thumbs up! If you only see one movie this lifetime, this is the one to see!

    2. Re:Haven't they learned... by 1u3hr · · Score: 1

      If Timothy didn't read the text ("visualize of them on the on the run" WTF?) you expect him to check links?

  3. What's going on in the movie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can someone explain how the movie is showing the modeling of various supernovea? Seems to me the author is just chaning various parameters of a local algorithm to modify the model - how is this showing the distributed nature, and what infact is the graphic on the left?

    (Sorry, not a Physics geek!)

    PS, WTF is up with the font in this I'm-not-a-robot image?! Look like it was made by a spider on crack...

    1. Re:What's going on in the movie by Toxygen · · Score: 3, Informative

      The experiment isn't done to show us what supernovea look like, it's more like they've discovered that the gpu from their graphics cards are better suited to the types of operations required to define a supernova than a traditional cpu. The video is just a shiny bonus.

  4. They can do this.... by Bloodlent · · Score: 4, Funny

    But they can't bring back Suprnova? Dammit! How am I gonna get my Desperate Housewives?!

    1. Re:They can do this.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well its not a suprnova, but it certainly is a mininova.org

    2. Re:They can do this.... by bhebing · · Score: 1

      Get married???

  5. Ulterior motive? by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 5, Funny


    From TFA:


    Peter Schröder, a computer simulation expert at the California Institute of Technology, believes graphics processors have great potential for scientific research. "There is a real market driving this hardware that we can use for scientific computation," he told New Scientist.

    Actually, Peter and his buds just got sick of getting scragged in DeathMatch because the video cards in their lab computers are teh SUXX0R.
    Now, they have a blank check to get whatever video cards they want.

    ^_^
    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Ulterior motive? by DAldredge · · Score: 1

      Shh!

      You are going to ruin it for EVERYONE!

  6. Don't look at the movie with remaining eye! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The movie uses orthogonal projection, which is known to cause headaches. It is like looking at a far-away rotating cube through a telescope all day long.

    1. Re:Don't look at the movie with remaining eye! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually it looked more like a rotation of a mutated chicken embryo albeit on a theoretically galactic scale.

  7. I must say by Pretendstocare · · Score: 1, Funny

    worst video ever....

    1. Re:I must say by isny · · Score: 1

      Yeah. And with a soundtrak by John Cage. Dreadful.

    2. Re:I must say by joepeg · · Score: 2, Informative

      I believe this is the Mike Batt version.

      --

      ZEN is a prime number in base-36

    3. Re:I must say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pretendstocare.. like anyone can even know that.

    4. Re:I must say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *Breathes out loudly in exasperation*

  8. "Captain, the servers, they cannae take no more!" by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, you've destroyed those nice scientists computers.

    Go to your rooms and I want you to think long and hard about what you've done!

    --
    Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
  9. Been there done that by a_greer2005 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have seen graphics cards go supernova - just overclock one and you can see it too...FOR REAL, no 3D sim crap,..

    1. Re:Been there done that by HazE_nMe · · Score: 2, Informative

      I tried... When I OC too high it just locks the computer up and scrambles the onscreen fonts... For a real show turn off the lights, voltmod a card, remove the hsf during HL2, and pour saltwater on it when it starts smoking. ;)

  10. I myself have done similar things on Linux by Winckle · · Score: 5, Funny

    boot up the GIMP: filters>light effects>supernova dunno what the big deal is?

  11. I'd have thought it obvious. by jd · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now they've simulated supernovae on their graphics cards, they want to try creating one for real in their web server.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  12. Movie torrent by slavemowgli · · Score: 3, Informative

    BitTorrent for the movie, in case of Slashdotting: here

    --
    quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
    1. Re:Movie torrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Save your bits - it's crap. Two thumbs down.

  13. torrents and mirrors by xbmodder · · Score: 2, Informative

    the PDF http://xbmodder.us/scout.pdf the torrent for the .mov: http://xbmodder.us/Scout.mov.torrent The torrent for avi (divx4) http://xbmodder.us/Scout.avi.torrent

    1. Re:torrents and mirrors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The avi link is dead

  14. spelling by memnon · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    could there be anymore spelling errors in this or what?

    1. Supernovae (in the topic)

    2. "and to visualize of them on the on the run."
    not spelling but one to many "on the" :)

    1. Re:spelling by Winckle · · Score: 1

      I think Supernovae is the plural form of Supernova

    2. Re:spelling by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 1

      As opposed to bad grammar, such as "anymore"?

      [runs away]

    3. Re:spelling by NoseBag · · Score: 1

      not spelling but one to many "on the" :)

      That should be "...one too many..."

      Glass houses....stones....you get the idea.

      --
      Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
    4. Re:spelling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mister, you think it right.

  15. Article Correction (Los Alamos) by smoany · · Score: 5, Informative

    Usually, I think that New Scientist is pretty accurate as far as laymen-science articles go, but they've let a big mistake slip be.

    From the article:
    "The Scout programming language, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in California, US, lets scientists run complex calculations on a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) instead of its central processing unit (CPU).

    Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) is based in (fittingly) Los Alamos, New Mexico. it is currently operated by the University of California, which has contracted for the ability to manage the lab. This may have caused the confusion.

    Also, Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) is based in Northern California, so that may have caused the confusion as well.

    Not a terribly serious concern, but their fact's should be straight. The lab is not in California, it is in New Mexico... Editors: shame on you!

    1. Re:Article Correction (Los Alamos) by bjason82 · · Score: 1

      Acually, smoany, in an effort to be even MORE correct, you might be wrong in one way. I live in Livermore, CA and it is home to not one, but TWO national laboratories; LNLL and Sandia National Laboratories. Although, LNLL and Los Alamos might do some collaborative work, Sandia, in fact, is Los Alamos' sister Lab. Now, I'm not sure on all the details, but if I had to make an educated guess I'd assume that you meant Sandia Lab in Livermore, CA. Check this out, you'll notice that the two labs are separated by east avenue, LNLL is much larger in size. Sandia is below LNLL on the map. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=livermore,+ca&ll=37. 679737,-121.707165&spn=0.010364,0.015664&t=k&hl=en

    2. Re:Article Correction (Los Alamos) by noidentity · · Score: 1


      [...] but they've let a big mistake slip be.

      [...]

      Not a terribly serious concern, but their fact's should be straight. [...] Editors: shame on you!

      Shame on your editor! :)

    3. Re:Article Correction (Los Alamos) by smoany · · Score: 1

      yeah... I already caught those, about 10 seconds after I posted. It's all there. Try reading the replies before posting one.

    4. Re:Article Correction (Los Alamos) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't be a snotty asshole about corrections - he wasn't.

  16. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That was okay, but nowhere near as good as the Supernova "simulator" in Final Fantasy VII

  17. Oh, the irony by smoany · · Score: 2, Funny

    Of course, in my hurry to post my response, I let a few big editing slips pass by...

    It should be "Slip by" not "Slip be"

    Also, it should read "facts" not "fact's".

    Oh well. I never said I was good at editing, only that New Scientist should have been.

  18. MPAA Cease and desist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.
    15503 VENTURA BOULEVARD
    ENCINO, CALIFORNIA 91436
    UNITED STATES
    PHONE: (818) 728-8127
    Email: MPAA23@pacbell.net
    Anti-Piracy Operations

    Date: June 11, 2005

    Dear slavemowgli:

    The Motion Picture Association of America is authorized to act on behalf of the following copyright owners:

    Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. Disney Enterprises, Inc. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Paramount Pictures Corporation TriStar Pictures, Inc. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation United Artists Pictures, Inc. United Artists Corporation Universal City Studios, Inc. Warner Bros., a Division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P.

    We have knowledge that you posted a torrent to one of our client's movie (The Scout : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111094/) and are demanding that you withdraw this link at once.

    Failure to do so will make you loose more then just your modpoints :P ...

  19. slashdot expands by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Supernovea are really just galactic servers that have been royally slashdotted.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  20. What about precision??? by geneing · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If I understand correctly graphics cards don't implement IEEE floating point standard. This means that you can expect all kinds of wierd problems with complicated floating point computations ahref=http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754st atus/754story.htmlhttp://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkah an/ieee754status/754story.html>. I wonder how they know they can trust results of their simulations.

    1. Re:What about precision??? by mmp · · Score: 2, Informative

      NVIDIA's GPUs are only one or two bits short of perfect 32 bit IEEE floats. (ATI's are still at 24 bit floats.)

      See Karl Hillesland and Anselmo Lastra's cool work on measuring this error on current GPUs, GPU Floating-Point Paranoia for much more information.

      -matt

    2. Re:What about precision??? by non0score · · Score: 2, Informative

      Err, what? All graphics cards that implement ARB_color_buffer_float has to implement IEEE 32-bit floats, as stipulated by ARB extension specification. (of course, this is assuming that the scientists are using the color buffer to encode information)
      http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/AR B/color_buffer_float.txt
      Basically, any up-to-date ATi or NVidia gfx cards are capable of true IEEE 32-bit floating point numbers. What really worries me about the research is that they're not using 64-bit!

    3. Re:What about precision??? by geneing · · Score: 1
      It's not a question of the size of a fp number. There are many subtle points in designing "safe" floating point arithmetic.

      IEEE 754 compliance makes fp operations slower, which is why hardware doesn't often support it (famous example Cray where SQRT(1-COS(X)) could return with an error root of a negative number).

      Roundoff errors might not matter for graphics (who cares about being one pixel off?), but it is a huge problem for numerical computations.

      Also, does GPU signal overflow/underflow/division by zero?

    4. Re:What about precision??? by geneing · · Score: 2, Insightful
      It's not a question of the size of a fp number. There are many subtle points in designing "safe" floating point arithmetic.

      IEEE 754 compliance makes fp operations slower, which is why hardware doesn't often support it (famous example Cray where SQRT(1-COS(X)) could return with an error root of a negative number).

      Roundoff errors might not matter for graphics (who cares about being one pixel off?), but it is a huge problem for numerical computations.

      Also, does GPU signal overflow/underflow/division by zero??

    5. Re:What about precision??? by KillShill · · Score: 1

      well maybe they have a reference? they check their results against known quantities.

      but then again, they may be "unethical" scientists...

      --
      Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
    6. Re:What about precision??? by TrurlTheConstructor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I did RFTA, and they don't actually run the simulation on the graphics card. On the contrary, they had to downsample the data from 320^3 to 256^3 just to fit it into the GPU's memory. All they did in the GPU was a bit of post-processing (and the rendering, which looks nice enough).

      In a more general sense, I wouldn't "trust" the result of a hydro-only simulation of a SN explosion in any detail. Too much physics left out, and a lot of chaotic dynamics which are only barely resolved (or not at all). An experiment like this is indicative of the likely behavior of a general class of models, but it's not a prediction.

  21. Neat stuff.. by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 1

    I was on a flight out of SLC and the guy next to me was working on modelling explosion with some software they had developed - I believe it was this. Quite interesting and we had a nice discussion during the flight.

    The software can do a lot of simulations that previously took a lot mor ehorsepower.

    --
    I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
    1. Re:Neat stuff.. by sadangel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, that's a different project. As the only one from Utah directly working on this project, I can tell you it wasn't me. Utah has another project that is also quite interesting. csafe is involved in simulating explosions and fires. It was likely someone working on that.

    2. Re:Neat stuff.. by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 1

      Must of been - anyway, both look like pretty neat stuff.

      --
      I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
  22. Los Alamos and supernovae collapse.... by mikael · · Score: 2

    ... Are they designing a nova bomb?

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    1. Re:Los Alamos and supernovae collapse.... by isny · · Score: 1

      Nova?? No disassemble number 5!

    2. Re:Los Alamos and supernovae collapse.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wrong movie, Poindexter.

  23. Where's the kaboom? by simon13 · · Score: 1

    Interesting video clip, but somewhat disappointing! I think Marvin the Martian said it correctly: "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!".

  24. Re:"Captain, the servers, they cannae take no more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What Los Alamos does with graphics cards, Slashdot does with servers.

  25. Dual Core: CPU + GPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    AMD should hook up with nVidia and then dump a lot of cash into Scout development...

  26. Source? License? by tbo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know this is slashdot, and I appreciate all the Beowulf cluster jokes, especially since they're actually appropriate here, but nobody is asking any meaningful questions. By my calculations, the noise-to-signal ratio is illegal div_by_zero.

    Where can I get Scout? What is the license? What platforms are supported? I'm working on an open-source scientific computing package for doing quantum simulations, and I'd like to use Scout for visualization, but this article provides no information on where to get Scout or even if the licensing would allow me to use it.

    It's also not clear exactly how you'd link Scout up with an existing app. Does Scout produce machine code that you stick into your app somehow? Are there C or C++ wrappers for using Scout?

    1. Re:Source? License? by steve_vmwx · · Score: 1

      Duuude

      Just means you've got some leg work to do. You've got the coder's name and organisation. Hunt him down :)

      Most science pro's are prepared to at least talk about their projects if not share.

      Cheers
      Stevo

      --
      Forget the truth. Science is fact.
    2. Re:Source? License? by Shisha · · Score: 1

      This might be a good starting point:
      http://www.gpgpu.org/

      (before you start emailing people.
      Good luck.

  27. Table lamp supernova? by michaeldot · · Score: 1

    It's probably just me, but did anyone else think the way the model ended up in the last frame of the movie look remarkably like a table lamp?

    Something distinctly Douglas Adams about it all. Maybe they were infinite improbability constants being entered in the console panel.

  28. Sad days. by imsabbel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Slashdot should rename itself to "news for computer kiddies and layed of cynical IT-veterans who lost touch with technology".

    Both this story and the last one (the quad core one) were nice technical stuff, perfect for nerds.
    And lets take a look here. at the time of that posting , only 2 or 3 comments are even remotely touching the subject. The rest is stupid jokes and dumb ranting.
    The quad core article is even worse, were the only non-joke posters are to stupid to tell apart SMT and dualcore.

    Also it seems to be a sad trend that the initial reaction to ANYTHING even slightly technical/scientific seems to be a self preservation (" im not stupid, this stuff is just ununderstandable !!!11") joke posting.

    --
    HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    1. Re:Sad days. by Maestro4k · · Score: 1
      Both this story and the last one (the quad core one) were nice technical stuff, perfect for nerds. And lets take a look here. at the time of that posting , only 2 or 3 comments are even remotely touching the subject. The rest is stupid jokes and dumb ranting. The quad core article is even worse, were the only non-joke posters are to stupid to tell apart SMT and dualcore. You're aware it's Saturday right? A weekend day in the US, most people are off work. Even geeks and nerds tend to go do something fun on weekends if they can, so the traffic on /. drops. I'd say the lack of intelligent comments is more due to the lack of people checking /. today than the community in general.

      I do have to point out that you're not exactly helping the signal to noise ratio by posting a complaint about it either.

    2. Re:Sad days. by deglr6328 · · Score: 1

      I know! And the rest of the posters are too stupid to know the difference between the words to and too!

      --
      - "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
  29. Torrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A torrent file, for your enjoyment. Someone please grab it and seed quickly as I can't for long. I did the hard part... http://www.uberprofile.info/torrent/details.php?in fo_hash=b53a78200d3369b4951730d39c95c574bce383c0

  30. Nice to see this idea surface again by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Every few years it seems that some variant of using the GPU comes back for scientific computing. I seem to remember in the early 90s a group using the graphics card for the additional memory it could provide. I run quantum-chemistry simulations for a living (basically large quantities of matrix algebra), so anything that could speed up calculations currently taking weeks would be appreciated.

    Personally, I'd like to see someone port BLAS (or the ATLAS variant) to a set of standard gpus, so that we could speed up matrix ops. I've been hoping for a more general-purpose solution making it to market, such as the old Celerity strap-on vector unit except for modern IA32/AMD64/PPC, but this may be the better solution.

    For those of us who don't have a budget for a Power5 or Cray system, maybe a pair of PCI-e cards running the matrix algebra and FFT routines would be the way to go.

    --
    the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
    1. Re:Nice to see this idea surface again by sadangel · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's been found that GPUs, despite their impressive floating point capabilities, can't compare to heavily-optimized and cache coherent CPU implementations of large matrix operations, such as ATLAS. The exception is when the result is to be displayed anyway, as in scientific visualization and Scout. The real drawback of GPUs is the readback speeds. When the result is done, if it isn't to be displayed, it must be read back into the CPU memory. This is notoriously inefficient. PCIe is improving this, but it's still a serious problem.

    2. Re:Nice to see this idea surface again by Infinite+Entropy · · Score: 1

      Would it be possible to use dvi out and rig up a second computer to take the dvi output of the first computer as input as a workaround?

    3. Re:Nice to see this idea surface again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Clever boy/girl. But I would assume that the DVI input on the other computer would be to memory on its graphics card, so you'd just be moving the problem to another computer. What you need is a special piece of hardware on a PCI(e) card that can receive and decode a DVI signal and place the frame(s) in main memory. Then you could just do a loopback to the same computer, and you wouldn't need a second machine.

  31. As opposed to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Simulating supernovae with graphics cards...

    As opposed to simulating them with sound cards...

  32. Hmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Every time a setting was changed, the figure inside the cube just looked more and more like a duck fetus. ...Nobody else thinks so?

    1. Re:Hmm.... by NoseBag · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure. I've never seen a duck fetus.

      --
      Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
  33. *ahem* by uberred · · Score: 1

    At this point I would like to mention that the University of Utah is awesome. *quickly shovels any mention of Flieschmann and/or Pons under the rug* ;)

    --
    Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
  34. Re:But still by deimtee · · Score: 1

    It's very bright.

    --
    I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
  35. seti@home by frostilicus2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In a similar vein, the seti@home project is currently developing a new project called "Astropulse" to scan the skies for optical signals from ET. This is also designed to use GPU code to perform the signal analysis. (It would be interesting to see how this woud perform on a PS3, especially now the PS3 is rumoured to ship with Linux pre-installed)

    --
    Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
  36. Timothy is functionally illiterate by 1u3hr · · Score: 1

    to visualize of them on the on the run?

  37. Doing math on graphics cards by WillWare · · Score: 1
    There have been a few posts complaining (accurately) that the majority of the response to this story has been all jokes and no thinking. The reason for the Beowulf clusters we all joke about is to do big math problems, including simulations of proteins and other big molecules, weather and climate, cosmology stuff like supernovae, etc. FLOPS are our friends, and we should make better use of them, especially cheap ones like the FLOPS in graphics cards (see http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=553 00904). Discussions on the beowulf.org mailing list (http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2001-March/thread. html#2579) indicate those guys think the overhead of communication between CPU and GPU is too expensive, and graphics hardware becomes obsolete too quickly.

    The people in TFA are part of a larger group (see http://www.gpgpu.org/) that thinks about how to use graphics cards for a wide variety of math problems. Here's an abstract from one of their papers:

    In our experiments we compare the execution on a midclass GPU (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700LE) with a high-end CPU (Pentium 4 3.2GHz). The results show that to achieve high speedup with the GPU you need to: (1) format the vectors into two-dimensional arrays; (2) process large data arrays; and (3) perform a considerable amount of operations per data element.
    Apparently GPU architecture is so quirky that it's hard to write a general-purpose API to exploit it. Consequently there tend to be entirely seperate efforts for different classes of computational problems. If graphics cards weren't such a commodity, this kind of bad engineering practice would be unacceptable.

    I'll repeat a cool link posted by somebody else: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~ibr/projects/paranoia/ - this is a program, originally written in the 80s, to characterize the performance and idiosyncracies of a floating-point processor. Recent work at UNC Chapel Hill has been done on Windows platforms. (Twenty years ago, UNC Chapel Hill was one of the hotbeds of computer graphics development that eventually gave us Shrek and The Incredibles.)

    --
    WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
  38. HCI by Aeternal · · Score: 1

    The program running this simulation has the Sh**iest user interface.