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

[mehrotra.akash]

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?

Re:can it run crysis 2?

[Antisyzygy]

8 cores = 2-3 cores + 4 GB for the game's cpu and memory requirements and 5-6 cores + 12 GB to model a GPU with dedicated memory access. Not sure if GPU modelling has ever been done before, but I bet its possible with that much cpu access and memory. Games used to run with software graphics acceleration back when I was in grade school. I remember I bought my first dedicated graphics card back in the Voodoo 3 days and could start selecting "Hardware Acceleration" in PC games.

Brain vs. Galaxy Simulation

[Sonny Yatsen]

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.

Re:800 AMD processor cores

[Antisyzygy]

Id guess they are running Opteron cpu's, maybe up to 8 core. So that means 50-100 machines in a cluster. 1600 / 50 = 32 gb per machine OR 1600/ 100 = 16 gb per machine.

How long before ...

[cowtamer]

The galaxies in the simulation develop planets, scientists, and their own Galaxy Simulators???

Has anyone else been bothered the fact that energy is quantized? It always made me feel like we were looking at pixels we weren't supposed to see :)

Re:Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me save those guys some time: 42

What were the input params again?

Re:Should have...

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have talked to SuperMicro.
That's just over 8 enclosures (4 nodes/enclosure) and fits in 18U.

It looks like this [supermicro.com].

Please Slashdot editors,

[Prune]

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.

Speed of light in a simulation

[mangu]

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

Even more significant is that there's an intrinsic speed limitation [wikipedia.org] 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.

reminds me of the "Simulation Argument"

[gundersd]

The simulation argument [simulation-argument.com] paper proposes a philosophical argument about this sort of thing. The consequences that they come up with are pretty interesting. Of course, there are arguments [pagesperso-orange.fr] against [imminst.org] such a configuration of the universe as well...