Scientists Using Supercomputers To Puzzle Out Dinosaur Movement 39
Nerval's Lobster writes "Scientists at the University of Manchester in England figured out how the largest animal ever to walk on Earth, the 80-ton Argentinosaurus, actually walked on earth. Researchers led by Bill Sellers, Rudolfo Coria and Lee Margetts at the N8 High Performance Computing facility in northern England used a 320 gigaflop/second SGI High Performance Computing Cluster supercomputer called Polaris to model the skeleton and movements of Argentinosaurus. The animal was able to reach a top speed of about 5 mph, with 'a slow, steady gait,' according to the team (PDF). Extrapolating from a few feet of bone, paleontologists were able to estimate the beast weighed between 80 and 100 tons and grew up to 115 feet in length. Polaris not only allowed the team to model the missing parts of the dinosaur and make them move, it did so quickly enough to beat the deadline for PLOS ONE Special Collection on Sauropods, a special edition of the site focusing on new research on sauropods that 'is likely to be the "de facto" international reference for Sauropods for decades to come,' according to a statement from the N8 HPC center. The really exciting thing, according to Coria, was how well Polaris was able to fill in the gaps left by the fossil records. 'It is frustrating there was so little of the original dinosaur fossilized, making any reconstruction difficult,' he said, despite previous research that established some rules of weight distribution, movement and the limits of dinosaurs' biological strength."
Surprise Twist! (Score:3)
320 gigaflops/second (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems there might be a typo in the article. 320 gigaflops/second is not that much, and can be gotten on a GPU for maybe $100 now. According to this page (http://n8hpc.org.uk/about/facilities), 320 gigaflops/second is the peak performance of each 2-cpu, 16-core sandy bridge node in the cluster, while the entire cluster has a peak performance of 110 teraflops/second. It is possible that this simulation just uses a single node on the cluster, but then it would be hardly worth mentioning the use of the cl
Re:320 gigaflops/second (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand. Gigaflops per second is an acceleration unit.
Run the sim for a while and you get a very very fast cluster indeed...
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Nope, the 320 GFLOPS is per node (Score:2)
...and the cluster consists of 332 nodes. So according to the lab's homepage [n8hpc.org.uk] the whole cluster is able to deliver 110 TFLOPS (Tera Floating-point operations per second). You'd need to buy a couple of GPUs to equal that.
I don't understand what you mean by acceleration unit. Each node delivers that performance instantly. There is no change over time.
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from OP: 320 gigaflops/second
That's 320 Giga-Floating-point operations per second per second. Because the ps in "flops" is "per second".
Quantity per second squared is an acceleration.
Like an ATM Machine, really.
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GFLOPS per second = Billion Floating Point Operations per Second per Second. It's an acceleration unit, and a mistake.
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It seems there might be a typo in the article. 320 gigaflops/second is not that much, and can be gotten on a GPU for maybe $100 now. According to this page (http://n8hpc.org.uk/about/facilities), 320 gigaflops/second is the peak performance of each 2-cpu, 16-core sandy bridge node in the cluster, while the entire cluster has a peak performance of 110 teraflops/second.
Ah now http://www.sciencedaily.com/ [sciencedaily.com] claims it's the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers :}
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131030125538.htm [sciencedaily.com]
Interpolation... (Score:2)
So, starting with a few partial chunks of data, and guessing the shape of the others based on overall dinosaurs knowledge, we got a very high precision simulation.
At least when we get an election poll, it usually is delivered with a calculated uncertainty margin.
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Just like all the old misassembled dino skeletons, but this one's an animated 3D model you can port over to Team Fortres.
Yeah, that was kind of my reaction - the summary is written as if this model is a marvel of accuracy, but any claims about the dinosaur's movements will necessarily remain conjecture. Precision != accuracy.
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Extrapolating from a few feet of bone, paleontologists were able to estimate
Science at its best! Honestly though, I don't need a few feet of bone to estimate that this very same dinosaur was an excellent conversationalists and patron of the high arts.
Wait, what?! (Score:5, Funny)
You're telling me that SCIENTISTS, actual scientists, are turning to COMPUTERS, to do their work?
What is the world coming to?
Accuracy? (Score:2)
Extrapolating from a few feet of bone, paleontologists were able to estimate the beast weighed between 80 and 100 tons and grew up to 115 feet in length.
A few feet of bone... like what? A femur, perhaps? So, from a couple of feet of femur, they can determine the size and shape of the entire animal? How do they know it was a brontosaur*-style vs a tyrannosaur style animal? How do they know this is the bone of a separate species and isn't the bone of an animal suffering from a glandular defect? Extrapolating the characteristics of a species from one very incomplete sample... I sense a large percentage of handwaving, guesswork and artistic license taking
Big numbers (Score:2)
N8 HPC currently operate Polaris, an SGI High Performance Computing cluster, with 332 compute nodes. Each node has two of the latest Intel Sandy Bridge processors and these nodes have a capacity of 320 GigaFLOPS/second. By using all of the nodes of Polaris together, a peak performance of 110 TeraFLOPS/second. Unlocking this peak performance has been helped by our use of a fast InfiniBand interconnect joining the nodes together.
- http://n8hpc.org.uk/about/facilities [n8hpc.org.uk]
So my GPU isn't three times faster. Oh well. Can't win 'em all.
I am going to call BS... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am always amazed at how much under-estimation of dinosaurs there is. Remember when we thought Tyranosaurus Rex was slow? Now, we estimate that it runs at what? up to 35 mph?
Now, I wonder what their model would predict the top speed of an Elephant to be? If you look at an Elephant and it's gait you'd think it slow. But it can reach top speeds of 25 mph. Guess what, if you compare an elephant to most other animals in a simulation. You would not conclude that they could hit 25mph. Why? Because elephants don't really run as other animals. They always have one foot on the ground. Their movement doesn't match. So if you said, take an elephant and model it to see if it can run. It would return back that it was incapable of running. When in fact, elephants have a modified gait that they use for higher speeds.
I'd wager the movement is akin to pogo'ing affect. If you've ever run with your knees locked, you'll understand what I mean. It's clearly not as fast as "running" but it can be faster than walking. But whatever, however, you want to describe it. An elephant exceeds the speeds a typical model would show it capable of.
Now, if you take these premises, and create a model. Your conclusions are going to be "fail". Why? Because you have limited knowledge. Take a large saurapod and model it after a running gait. It will show negative results. So you say, hey, let's see how it does with a more elephant like gait. Cause elephants don't really run, but they can charge at up to 25mph. Results fail. You now conclude that said giant beastie is only capable of 5mph walk.
YOU ARE WRONG!!!! Because you've predicted based on a model without understanding other forms of movement. Would 5mph be sustainable for the achievement of accessing food? avoiding predators? etc. In other words, can a 5mph speed sustain a giant saurapod's lifestyle?
Consider for a moment that many lizards when they run seem to not just use their legs, but rather bend their elongated bodies left and right creating a wiggle affect. Rather similar to what a snake does. It is not just the reach of the legs, but the shortening of the torso that affects the speed and movement of some lizards.
And it may very well be likely that a similar body function would allow greater speed. Most extremely slow moving creatures such as turtles, have a tendency to be armored and protected.
My gutt feels like they're missing an unknown aspect of mechanics. And that such creatures could probably reach at least 8-12mph
Re:I am going to call BS... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're right about the size of this animal, it really is hard to imagine its bones and muscles being sturdy enough to handle it moving particularly fast. Also, as far as outrunning predators, what exactly would eat one of these things? Even in the modern world, the largest animals really only have to worry about predators if they are young, sick or vastly outnumbered. A fully grown Argentinosaurus wasn't likely to need to run away from much of anything.
The problem is a tendency to underestimate... (Score:5, Interesting)
They once thought these animals couldn't even raise their tales.
The length was too long. They were too big.
Yet look at giant Anacondas. Neither slow nor weak and with a vascular system running blood up and down its length. The truth is, nearly every under-assumption of these creatures has been proven wrong.
Look at our large land animals: elephant, rhino, moose, giraffe, polar bear....NONE OF WHICH ARE SLOW
Now, they're never fast as pinnacle predators cats, wolves, etc. But they're never slow. Rather, it is not speed they tend to lack, but agility. They often can charge forward at a brisk pace, but most are not very good at high speed turns.
I'll still wager $5 they're completely mis-analyzing due to mis-conceived models. A penguin fails at a flight model. But it would be pretty darn stupid to then conclude that a penguin's top speed is a mere 2-3mph. Simply because you never thought to consider an aquatic model.
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They once thought these animals couldn't even raise their tales.
The length was too long. They were too big.
Well, Tolkein managed to get the Silmarillion published.
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That he did...but can it be turned into a trilogy?
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My gut tells me that at least one thing they are missing in the mechanics is that these were aquatic animals. The inverse square law has always suggested strongly that it would be very dangerous for these things to try and walk on dry ground - and a broken leg would be fatal for them without exception. But they inhabited supertropical swampland areas and if they kept a good portion of their bulk in the water...
Food (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone figured out how much food these things had to eat to grow that big, how long they had to live?
My questions are about the likelyhood of these things being "common" at those sizes.
QWOP Dinosaur Edition (Score:3)
...which actually sounds pretty good
*stumbles sideways falls over stegosaurus*
Just came here to post exactly this. (Score:2)
Science or S.W.A.G. (scientific wild-assed guess)? (Score:2)
fill in the gaps (Score:2)
The really exciting thing, according to Coria, was how well Polaris was able to fill in the gaps left by the fossil records.
And we know it did so correctly because ... ?
Computer modelers are the new armchair scientists (Score:1)