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Touring a Carnival Cruise Simulator: 210 Degrees of GeForce-Powered Projection
MojoKid writes Recently, Carnival cruise lines gave tours of their CSMART facility in Almere, the Netherlands. This facility is one of a handful in the world that can provide both extensive training and certification on cruise ships as well as a comprehensive simulation of what it's like to command one. Simulating the operation of a Carnival cruise ship is anything but simple. Let's start with a ship that's at least passingly familiar to most people — the RMS Titanic. At roughly 46,000 tons and 882 feet long, she was, briefly, the largest vessel afloat. Compared to a modern cruise ship, however, Titanic was a pipsqueak. As the size and complexity of the ships has grown, the need for complete simulators has grown as well. The C-SMART facility currently sports two full bridge simulators, several partial bridges, and multiple engineering rooms. When the Costa Concordia wrecked off the coast of Italy several years ago, the C-SMART facility was used to simulate the wreck based on the black boxes from the ship itself. When C-SMART moves to its new facilities, it'll pick up an enormous improvement in processing power. The next-gen visual system is going to be powered by104 GeForce Grid systems running banks of GTX 980 GPUs. C-SMART executives claim it will actually substantially reduce their total power consumption thanks to the improved Maxwell GPU. Which solution is currently in place was unclear, but the total number of installed systems is dropping from just over 500 to 100 rackmounted units.
At 882 feet, the modern 1100 foot super cruise ship doesn't kill it.
In gross tonnes, however, they're 3-4x larger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Does it also simulate how viruses propagate amongst passengers? Can you simulate the scenario where all the toilets clog and the decks are awash with filth?
I demand realism from my simulators!
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
tl;dr... 210 degrees.... since we're speaking of GeForce devices... is that in Celsius? :p
The only thing that the captain of the Costa Concordia needed to avoid those rocks was the ability to read a chart!
I see what you did here!
she was, briefly, the largest vessel afloat
No, she was the largest vessel, briefly afloat :-)
I thought this had already been completed with the release of Carnival Cruise Line Tycoon 2005: Island Hopping
>:D
Tumbles true doesn't it
about that...
Simulation is hard to come by.
... for the bathroom jokes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I had a coworker who took a cruise down to Mexico. He got plastered one night, blacked out and woke up without his pants. People pointed and laughed at him after he got dressed for breakfast. He discovered that he was the daily highlight on the CCTV channel, ripping off his pants and dancing Saturday Night-style.
Que the norovirus jokes
At Warsash there is a similar set of systems: http://www.warsashacademy.co.uk/facilities/facilities.aspx
The engine room simulation looks pretty nice: http://www.warsashacademy.co.uk/facilities/engine-room-simulator/full-mission-engine-room-simulator.aspx
Damn, I thought it was a game! I was thinking I could go hang with Gopher and Isaac at the lido deck lounge then try to bag Julie the cruise director.
I don't want to do a sig now
Pah. Amateur. Cruise buffet lines NEVER close.
The entire setup is designed to constantly cycle the passenger-ballast.
So they can simulate running aground, sinking, getting jacked by pirates, all the plumbing failing, people throwing up, kids running around being brats, the restaurants running out of food, and the ship claiming your tickets are incorrect? That must have taken a lot of clever programming.
Engine rooms, not "engineering rooms" you complete landlubber.
My first thought was that the cards were running at a temperature of 210 degrees. Thanks, Fermi.
This is not new. I was working on Ships Bridge Simulators like this for the Royal Navy in 1992.
Not quite with this compute or graphics potential but they've been making steady improvements for years.
Yes, a modern cruise ship does indeed "kill it". In length, volume, speed, height, and weight. You could probably fit 8-10 titanics in the AVERAGE modern cruise ship.