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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"
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.
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?
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
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.
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