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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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.