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Simulating Galaxies With Supercomputers
An anonymous reader writes "Over in the UK Durham University is tasking its supercomputing cluster with nothing less than recreating how galaxies are born and evolve over the course of billions of years. Even with 800 AMD processor cores at its disposal the university is still hitting the limits of what is possible."
800 AMD processor cores, that knowledge is useless, need more info regarding that, are they ultra low power ones like Atom/Bobcat, or extremely high clocked, such as the i7 980x/ Phenom x6 1090,etc
Also article says that they have 1600GB RAM, isnt RAM normally in powers of 2?
They should have asked The Doctor to simply record the event when he re-booted the Universe.
800 cores.... that's like 134 CPU's, With 4 CPU's per node, it's only 34 Nodes. A rack holds 48u.
So they have a problem that takes more then one rack of modern computers to handle?
8 cores = 2-3 cores + 4 GB for the game's cpu and memory requirements and 5-6 cores + 12 GB to model a GPU with dedicated memory access. Not sure if GPU modelling has ever been done before, but I bet its possible with that much cpu access and memory. Games used to run with software graphics acceleration back when I was in grade school. I remember I bought my first dedicated graphics card back in the Voodoo 3 days and could start selecting "Hardware Acceleration" in PC games.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
It's interesting to think that the university is attempting to use 800 processor cores to simulate galaxies, when IBM uses 147,456 processors to do a neuron-by-neuron simulation of the human brain.
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This is nothing. For my kindergarten thesis, I used galaxies to simulate supercomputers.
The galaxies in the simulation develop planets, scientists, and their own Galaxy Simulators???
Has anyone else been bothered the fact that energy is quantized? It always made me feel like we were looking at pixels we weren't supposed to see :)
Even with 800 AMD processor cores at its disposal the university is still hitting the limits of what is possible..
Meaningless uninformed journalist bs filler puff. What is possible, is simulating every subatomic particle in the universe at planck time intervals for the total age of the universe, repeatedly for an infinite combination of different cosmological constants to see what you get. That will never be done, of course.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Every year they can do more detail models. And they become clever in modeling. For example, aggregate gravity fields.
"what do you get if you multiply six by nine"
Let's simulate a single cell, then an organism, then aging. Then we can start extending our lifespan. THEN we can start living, not just this handful of years between being a powerless child and a weak, aging adult. Then you can worry about galaxies.
What does an astrophysicist know about cellular biology? Probably about as much as a biologist knows about astrophysics.
Compounding that, we wouldn't have made a fraction of the scientific progress to date if we focused on a single discipline until it was mastered before moving onto the next one. What good would supersonic airliners be if our civil and material engineering knowledge never learned how to make a tarmac which could support their weight?
Ever wonder how much of our knowledge of high energy particles and fields came about because of cross-pollenation from physicists?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
the grape-5 does N-body simulations using specialized hardware that is faster than a standard CPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Pipe
That's correct. In a simulation like this, the most important physical effect to model is gravity. Gravity doesn't have a range. For each timestep in the simulation, all the mass in the simulation has to interact with all the other mass in the simulation. There are a variety of numerical tricks that people who write these codes use to make the problem feasible, so that the computation time required doesn't scale as N^2, with N = number of particles in the simulation. But even with these tricks, to calculate the force on an individual particle, you still have to care about the stuff outside your local volume. These are problems you have to solve when you parallelize your code. Distributing the problem in an @home fashion would require so much inter-participant communication that at this point, it wouldn't really be practical.
Or two GPUs.
If it can run Crysis it can simulate galaxies.
I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe
be more careful with article summaries. They're wore than newspaper headlines these days. The "Over in the UK Durham University is tasking its supercomputing cluster with nothing less than recreating how galaxies are born and evolve over the course of billions of year" could describe any of the countless galaxy evolution simulations that have been done for a couple of decades already at various places, and gives no indication as to what's new about this instance. In other words, the headline is at best absolutely uninformative, and at worst, misleading.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Even more significant is that there's an intrinsic speed limitation in a simulation.
When you simulate a continuous medium by dividing it into small space and time steps, there's a speed "c" that's equal to the space step divided by the time step which cannot be exceeded by anything in the simulation.
The simulation argument paper proposes a philosophical argument about this sort of thing. The consequences that they come up with are pretty interesting. Of course, there are arguments against such a configuration of the universe as well...