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Simulating Supernovae with Graphics Cards
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"
BitTorrent for the movie, in case of Slashdotting: here
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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!
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.