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"

Comments

What about precision???

[geneing]

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.

Nice to see this idea surface again

[Frumious Wombat]

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.