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Scientists Complete Universe Millennium Simulation
james tech writes "The Virgo Consortium recently completed its massive "Millennium Simulation", tracing the universe's evolution from its early origins to present day. To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter which composes most of the universe. Using a 512-node cluster with IBM processors, the group produced over 20 terabytes of data with some of the most breathtaking images of the universe never seen. A visible matter simulation is underway, at a lower resolution."
Wow, this is some impressive stuff indeed.... Of course I'm talking about their "not yet slashdotted" webserver that's probably handling a lot of big 50MB downloads right now.
The scientists are working on future versions of the software that will exptrapolate the whole Millenium simulation from a piece of pie.
"20 terabytes of data" This has to be the most bloated screensaver ever!
Don't make your problems my problems!
After the images of the simulation were released, a second big bang was reported by the scientists of the project, originating from the server room.
Apparently all the packets on the internet condensed in one of their servers and created a second universe, from now on to be referred to as "cyberspace".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's nice to see where the £millions that get pumped into my uni's physics department actually goes. Now we have a pretty screensaver for all their effort.
> Authors: Volker Springel (1), Simon D. M. White (1), Adrian Jenkins (2), Carlos S. Frenk (2), Naoki Yoshida (3), Liang Gao (1), Julio Navarro (4), Robert Thacker (5), Darren Croton (1), John Helly (2), John A. Peacock (6), Shaun Cole (2), Peter Thomas (7), Hugh Couchman (5), August Evrard (8), Joerg Colberg (9), Frazer Pearce (10) ((1) MPA, (2) Durham, (3) Nagoya, (4) UVic, (5) McMaster, (6) Edinburgh, (7) Sussex, (8) Michigan, (9) Pittsburgh, (10) Nottingham)
Now you know why "et al." is one of the most important concepts in the natural sciences.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Virgo Consortium recently completed its massive "Millennium Simulation", tracing the universe's evolution from its early origins to present day. To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter...
Reminds me of a joke:
A rich oil-baron hires a veterinarian, a statistician and a physicist to develop a method for predicting the outcome of a horse race. The three scientists disappear for a week and each returns with a different method; The vet states "I have studied the form, health and blood-lines of all the horses for the next race and can confidently say that number 7 is the best of the lot. Whether he wins on the day, is another question". The Statistician boasts "I have studied the race histories of all the horses in the next race and all the races ran on this track and can definitely say that horse number 3 has a 85% chance of coming in the top 3". The physicist then strides up to the baron and boldly proclaims "I have developed a way to predict the outcome of any race with 100% accuracy! First, one assumes that the horses are perfectly spherical and moving through a vacuum...".
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
...of the server serving the pictures seems to have gone up in blazing fire. Anyone has a mirror?
Yay!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
...but not run the webserver? Come on!
Since it's pretty obvious that "dark matter" is just a hack to make the maths work; there's almost certainly no such thing. Oh, well.
I'd have to disagree, because we've found several draft scientific documents in the Kiev that indicate that In Soviet Russia dark matter made the maths work.
...is it art?
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
Because then the machine would have to simulate itself on earth, and could cause the program to crash. Think of the simulated /.ers!
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Let the Douglas Adams, and ruling order of mice, posts begin.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
Forty-two.
Ban Engadget - moderators censor comments!
I'm sleep deprieved, but have a fundamental question... the article said they only simulated 'dark matter' and produced 'breath-taking images'!!
Breath-taking images of *DARK MATTER* ??? WTF
- mritunjai
After 6 days of calculation, they took the next day off.
If I had a dollar for every stoned college kid that thought of that and exclaimed, "Whoa, dude," I'd have enough money to buy a supercomputer capable of simulating an entire universe of stoned college kids wondering whether they were in a computer simulation and exclaiming, "Whoa, dude."
The Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy has only been observed to hold within the Universe. "Before the Big Bang" is not within the Universe so we haven't much reason to insist that such laws operate there.
We'll have a lot more to go on once we figure out how to point telescopes at right angles to reality.