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

Ulterior motive?

[TripMaster Monkey]

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.

^_^

I myself have done similar things on Linux

[Winckle]

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

Article Correction (Los Alamos)

[smoany]

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!