Cray XK6 Supercomputer Used To Simulate Ice Cream

An anonymous reader writes "The processing power available inside modern supercomputers isn't just able to help us better understand the universe we live in, develop better medicines, and model complex systems. Apparently it is also helping to make better ice cream. Research has been carried out at the University of Edinburgh to simulate the soft matter that makes up ice cream. More specifically, scientists are trying to understand the complex interactions occurring between the many different ingredients that make up your favorite flavor of the delicious cold stuff."

Comments

The ice cream will melt before simulation runs....

[Foske]

How are you supposed to simulate something when the simulation generates so much heat that the simulated object can never exist long enough to run the simulation ?

Re:The ice cream will melt before simulation runs.

[Artea]

How are you supposed to simulate something when the simulation generates so much heat that the simulated object can never exist long enough to run the simulation ?

Don't worry, they simulated the freezer first.

Android

[rossdee]

You need a supercomputer to simulate Android 4.0 ?

What will it take to simulate Jelly Bean

BTW my tablet runs Honeycomb 3.2.1 OK.

Re:The ice cream will melt before simulation runs.

[starworks5]

Hopfully they find a way to create instant icecream

1/2 instant cold pack, 1/2 dehydratated icecream

1536 cores

[BumpyCarrot]

They all scream for ice cream.

weird inference

[Trepidity]

It's not clear to me why this research will improve ice cream's shelf life. Is shelf life limited by our understanding of the relevant physics?

Of course, I doubt that's why they're actually doing this, but it won't necessarily improve the practical side of making ice cream at all. That has been studied extensively an an empirical fashion, and we have pretty good information on how different methods and ingredients turn out. What's less clear is the reason for it, i.e. the physics behind some of the processes. That's good to learn to advance physics, but may or may not lead to practical improvements. And those practical improvements may or may not have anything to do with shelf life...

Re:weird inference

[jpatters]

I'm sure the physics will be interesting, but it is much more fun to study ice cream making empirically. I've had the best luck by simplifying as much as possible. That and a teaspoon of vodka per quart of ice cream keeps it soft and scoopable no matter how long it stays in the freezer.

Re:weird inference

[archmedes5]

There's a lot going in when making ice cream. For example, inclusions in the ice cream (like nuts or chocolate chips, etc...) can change certain properties of the surrounding mix, salts from nuts can lower its freezing point causing heat shock around the inclusions, acids from fruits can curdle the mix, some inclusions can leech into the ice cream, changing the flavor in ways not expected. An improper mix of emulsifiers and stabilizers can mean the ice cream can separate, even when frozen. An improper water, butterfat and air mix can cause the ice cream to freeze solid in hoses, which require line shut downs to fix, driving up costs. Some ice cream has to keep its shape for a certain amount of time before packaging or hardening, you need to plan your mix recipe for that.

Something like this can make things a LOT easier for those who make ice cream, and could easily drive down costs due to fewer issue in manufacturing, packaging, storing and transporting the final product.

Re:weird inference

[Badge 17]

While ice cream makers have probably done lots of experimentation, simulations like this (in addition to being cool physics for other reasons) can give us new directions to look in - e.g how should we change the emulsifier used. More fundamentally, what are the controlling factors for the failure of ice cream? Since TFA is a press release, you can get a better taste for the work the Edinburgh group does from their papers - a related one is at http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0410

I should also pitch this group's work more generally - Michael Cates' group does a lot of cool simulation work on the dynamics of liquid crystals, as well as active fluids, such as swarming tanks of bacteria. Most of it is on the arxiv, http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Stratford_K/0/1/0/all/0/1 and http://arxiv.org/find/cond-mat/1/au:+Cates_M/0/1/0/all/0/1

Some of the behaviors of fluids with active objects (bacteria or molecular motors) are quite unintuitive - if you try to push a sphere through one of these active fluids, it will sometimes go in the opposite direction of the force you apply to it! http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.1279

(I am a soft matter physicist, but not from this group.)

Re:The ice cream will melt before simulation runs.

[AK Marc]

When the ice cream giants take over the planet, someone will invent a time machine just to go back in time an tag this "what could possibly go wrong".

With great power comes...

[aneroid]

...great Ice Cream!

Scientists do indeed have great imagination.

Re:Universe

[durrr]

If we can't simulate ice-cream at the cone-size level, then how could we ever get it right when we create ice-cream planets for our fully immersive hedonistic virtual reality future?

Depending on how they keep their processor cool...

[barlevg]

New meaning to Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream?

Re:Anyone more than me...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Joking aside, you'd be surprised how poorly it's simulated for developers. Even using a VM solution instead of the official "virtual device" solution, it's horrendously slow on hardware that should have no trouble at all simulating it.

So, basically, the Ice Cream simulation runs at a glacial pace?