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Simulating Galaxies With Supercomputers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the delete-the-pool-ladder-quick dept.

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."

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Should have... by toastar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Re:Should have... by An+ominous+Cow+art · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is nothing. For my kindergarten thesis, I used galaxies to simulate supercomputers.

  3. Dual GTX 480 by mangu · · Score: 4, Funny

    800 cores.... that's like 134 CPU's

    Or two GPUs.

    If it can run Crysis it can simulate galaxies.

  4. Speed of light in a simulation by mangu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has anyone else been bothered the fact that energy is quantized?

    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.