Re:Aren't baryons just normal matter?
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Dark Matter Discovered
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· Score: 5, Informative
Tachyons are in fact hypothesized faster-than-light-particles, appearing for instance in certain string theory scenarios.
But baryons are by no means the counterpart to tachyons. All known elementary particles in the universe are either fermions (particles with spin in integer multiples of 1/2) or bosons (particles with integer spin). Bosons include the photon, the gluon and many others. The fermions are further subdivided into leptons and quarks. Leptons include the electron and the electron neutrino among others. Baryons are particles made up of three quarks, and are fermions and include among others, the proton and neutron, which are the most commonly found baryons in nature, since all heavier baryons normally decay.
Two quarks (fermions) can combine to form mesons, which are in fact bosonic in nature (since two quarks with spin half combine to form a particle with integer spin).
Hope that confused the issue a little:-)
A bit more on-topic: Finding baryons in this amount is a big deal, since baryon has previously been suspected to primarily exist in galaxies, and only in small amounts outside galaxies. While it by no means doesn't solve all problems of cosmology, it is a big help.
I'm guessing this has to do with whether the problems are parallelizeable or not.
Crunching the tons of different possibilities for the folding of a protein and whatever is the computing-heavy problem in quantum chemistry, e.t.c. basically involves many independent calculations.
In particle physics it is the same situation (IAPP). In our simulations we have many independent calculations that are repeated many times. Linux clusters built from off-the-shelf components are great for crunching these problems because of their parallelizability
I don't know how they do the 3D modelling of nuclear explosions, but the processes going on in certain parts of the explosion are apparently not independent of what goes in other parts, hence the problem is probably difficult to break into smaller parts for BlueGene (or similarly designed systems) to crunch. I would have thought this was all done using fluid dynamics, and wouldn't be too different from the models used in weather simulation, something the FA mentions as a posssible application for BlueGene, but apparently my intution on the modelling of nuclear explosions is not too good (which is a Good Thing, probably:)
These are just guesses (in other words, I'm just talking out of my arse here), but I seem to remember from earlier mentions of the computers the DoE (DoD?) have for simulating nuclear explosions, that they contain highly specialized hardware designed specially for this problem
So to answer your question, I think if you ran Make -f topsecret_DoE_Makefile 3D_model_of_big_motherfscking_nuke_going_bang it would probably run, albeit slowly. Remember to apt-get install nuke-devel before trying this at home
Girlfriend? Fast sports car(s)? Only 24? Social life on the beach? Maintainer on Gaim? What the bloody hell is going on?!?
Sure makes me feel like a real achiever, yeah... If you want me, I'll be over there in the corner, hiding under a blanket and sobbing.
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Tachyons are in fact hypothesized faster-than-light-particles, appearing for instance in certain string theory scenarios.
:-)
But baryons are by no means the counterpart to tachyons. All known elementary particles in the universe are either fermions (particles with spin in integer multiples of 1/2) or bosons (particles with integer spin). Bosons include the photon, the gluon and many others. The fermions are further subdivided into leptons and quarks. Leptons include the electron and the electron neutrino among others. Baryons are particles made up of three quarks, and are fermions and include among others, the proton and neutron, which are the most commonly found baryons in nature, since all heavier baryons normally decay.
Two quarks (fermions) can combine to form mesons, which are in fact bosonic in nature (since two quarks with spin half combine to form a particle with integer spin).
Hope that confused the issue a little
A bit more on-topic: Finding baryons in this amount is a big deal, since baryon has previously been suspected to primarily exist in galaxies, and only in small amounts outside galaxies. While it by no means doesn't solve all problems of cosmology, it is a big help.
I'm guessing this has to do with whether the problems are parallelizeable or not.
Crunching the tons of different possibilities for the folding of a protein and whatever is the computing-heavy problem in quantum chemistry, e.t.c. basically involves many independent calculations.
In particle physics it is the same situation (IAPP). In our simulations we have many independent calculations that are repeated many times. Linux clusters built from off-the-shelf components are great for crunching these problems because of their parallelizability
I don't know how they do the 3D modelling of nuclear explosions, but the processes going on in certain parts of the explosion are apparently not independent of what goes in other parts, hence the problem is probably difficult to break into smaller parts for BlueGene (or similarly designed systems) to crunch. I would have thought this was all done using fluid dynamics, and wouldn't be too different from the models used in weather simulation, something the FA mentions as a posssible application for BlueGene, but apparently my intution on the modelling of nuclear explosions is not too good (which is a Good Thing, probably :)
These are just guesses (in other words, I'm just talking out of my arse here), but I seem to remember from earlier mentions of the computers the DoE (DoD?) have for simulating nuclear explosions, that they contain highly specialized hardware designed specially for this problem
So to answer your question, I think if you ran Make -f topsecret_DoE_Makefile 3D_model_of_big_motherfscking_nuke_going_bang it would probably run, albeit slowly. Remember to apt-get install nuke-devel before trying this at home
Girlfriend? Fast sports car(s)? Only 24? Social life on the beach? Maintainer on Gaim? What the bloody hell is going on?!? Sure makes me feel like a real achiever, yeah... If you want me, I'll be over there in the corner, hiding under a blanket and sobbing.
In the same series there's also "AOL For Dummies". How's that for a redundant title!
What's next, "Scratching Your Ass for Dummies"?