First Full Observable-Universe Simulation 95
First time accepted submitter slashmatteo writes "The goal of the DEUS project (Dark Energy Universe Simulation) is to investigate the imprints of dark energy on cosmic structure formation through high-performance numerical simulations. In order to do so, the project has conducted a simulation of the structuring of the entire observable universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. Thanks to the Curie super-computer, the simulation has made it possible to follow the evolution of 550 billion particles. Two other complementary runs are scheduled by the end of May. More details in the press release."
FULL universe simulation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FULL universe simulation (Score:5, Funny)
It's right there, in particle 4153341989.
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Don't you mean particle #39766205?
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Re:FULL universe simulation (Score:5, Funny)
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Wow. That's bad. I mean real bad.
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/thread
Re:FULL universe simulation (Score:5, Funny)
Well I once heard that to have a real simulation of the universe, you would need to have a computer the size of the universe
Not if we use winzip to compress it.
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The universe compresses so much better if you just pipe it to /dev/null, and if you want to get it back you just do the reverse.
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Sounds like you need the black hole edition. Best compression IMO
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Well I once heard that to have a real simulation of the universe, you would need to have a computer the size of the universe
Not if we use winzip to compress it.
I prefer 7-Zip - smaller files when done right.
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This is pretty similar to the information theory proof that if a god exist, he cannot simultaneously be omniscient and be a part of the universe. It still leaves the possibility of a god outside the universe (ie, lacking full self-awareness), like a programmer watching a simulation from outside a computer.
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We just do bulk simulations of everything when no one is looking at the details.
Which means that we just need to simulate one really stupid human instead of an individual most of the time.
We had somewhat of a crisis when genius scientists were around and people wanted to observe the universe and every second required several clock cycles. We solved that with a really nice optimization patch; all the visionaries and scientific geniuses died of pancreatic cancer, entertainment media got a lot better and most
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It's just going to come back with 42 anyway...
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Well I once heard that to have a real simulation of the universe, you would need to have a computer the size of the universe. So this is more a rough simulation of the the visible Galaxies.
All models are simpler than the thing being modeled.
However, you can think of the universe as a gigantic computer that is running a program to... compute its future states?
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Forget that, what happens when it starts simulating thousands of gaming machines running Crysis on Vista?
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Forget that, what happens when it starts simulating thousands of gaming machines running Crysis on Vista?
Bingo.
The performance of universe rendering (a clever particle/wave algorithm) will start degrading.
Now, our lead developer chose to degrade the rendering of the details in a proportional way with the distance to the observer (they call it Hubble constant)... Anyway, rendering the details far away will be done with lower priority, thus they'll see the results later; also, when considering the radiosity rendering part (the part that deals with wave nature of rendering), they'll see the light waves with a r
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The Thirteenth Floor, anyone?
Recursion is a bitch.
I believe it is "Now" (Score:4, Funny)
You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.
What happened to then?
We passed then.
When?
Just now. We're at now now.
Go back to then.
When?
Now!
Now?
Now!
I can't.
Why?
We missed it.
When?
Just now.
When will then be now?
Soon.
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Let's just hope that the kids who are playing our SimUniverse don't suddenly get called to supper and they click the quit bu
We would never know anyway.
And for all we know, they may well quit the game every day (whatever a day is for them) and then restart it afterwards to resume from the saved state. Maybe they'll even play certain parts over and over again. We would never be able to tell.
I hope it isn't labeled (Score:5, Funny)
All we need is a pointer to Earth that says 'You are here.' and it's game over for us all!
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DEUS... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DEUS... (Score:4, Funny)
Nrrqshrr noted:
I didn't RTFA, but DEUS sounds like the perfect name for this project.
In fact, running on the Curie supercomputer makes it a DEUS ex machina!
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I didn't RTFA, but DEUS sounds like the perfect name for this project.
DEMIURGE [wikipedia.org] would have been better.
Has someone asked it... (Score:3)
if there was a way to reduce entropy in the Universe yet?
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And then have zillions of forks creating a true multiverse?
Re:Has someone asked it... (Score:5, Funny)
Insufficient data for a meaningful answer
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Insufficient data for a meaningful answer
It's ironic that AC should post that response...
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Only if parent adds wry comment by Richard Feynman...
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For all that don't know it,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
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if there was a way to reduce entropy in the Universe yet?
Yes, put it in the fridge.
The Multiverse Apocolapse (Score:3)
Only 550 billion particles? (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia's page "Galaxy":
"There are probably more than 170 billion (1.7 × 1011) galaxies in the observable universe."
550 billion particles to simulate the observable universe means just over three particles per galaxy. I don't know exactly what they're doing but it doesn't sound like much of a simulation..?
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It's a simulation; the map is not the territory.
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It's a simulation; the map is not the territory.
No, but if you simplify a map too much it becomes useless. For example if you draw a big circle on a piece of paper and label it "the world", it's not going to help you circumnavigate the globe, although it's not actually wrong.
Re:Only 550 billion particles? (Score:5, Insightful)
550 billion particles to simulate the observable universe means just over three particles per galaxy. I don't know exactly what they're doing but it doesn't sound like much of a simulation..?
That really depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are not interested in the interactions going on inside each galaxy, but rather the interactions between galaxies themselves as well as things like filaments and clusters and or superclusters, this is more than enough particles to use. In fact, if each particle is assumed to be a galaxy, then the surplus may well have been introduced to see failed galaxies or to find where initial seeds may not have turned into fully fledged galaxies. They may also account for a small portion of the vast numbers of dwarf galaxies to see how these interact with larger objects.
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I'm not impressed. Now, when they can run a simulation with more particles than the atoms in the computer, I'll be impressed. Heck, I'll make it easy, when they run a simulation more particles than transistors in their CPUs, I'll be impressed. Let's see, 92,000 CPUs @ ~ 2B/cpu = ~184T. Now that's a simulation.
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Woosh! Guess I didn't trigger your sarcasm detector.
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I actually had a concern as I typed it that including the second sentence would detract from the sarcasm, guess I should have left it off.
Great sig.
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FWIW, "more particles than the atoms in the computer" would be impossible with current technology since (presumably) you'd need to store at least one bit of state per particle, and current computers need more than an atom to store a single bit.
All you need is two bits. Map all the ones in your data to one location and all the zeros to the other.
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Perhaps the most important question is that what are we doing with the particles/waves/quantum states that we've got in our disposal.
I mean I'm able to run a perfect simulation by crunching it with my 4 core CPU: the crunching of a CPU with an object modeled from metal and wood.
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Next thing you know, they'll come up with "Universal Warming" and create a new tax on space ships...
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As another comparison an average grain of salt contains around 1.2x10^18 atoms verses this simulation's 5.5x10^11 particles. (source [physlink.com])
Disappointed. (Score:2)
I was lead to believe there would be faerie cake.
Sounds a bit small... (Score:1)
550 billion particles? That's it? How exactly does that equate to a "full observable-universe simulation"? Last I checked, the minimum estimate for our galaxy alone was 100 billion stars. Multiply that by at least 100 billion other *galaxies* and we're looking at... uh... a much larger number to even begin to simulate the entire observable universe.
I'm sure I'm significantly misunderstanding something about the simulation parameters though.
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The number of particles is not relevant.
You can do a one billion simulation of a single galaxy or of the whole universe. The purpose is different.
In this respect, a particle can represent a single star in one galaxy or a single galaxy in the universe. Large scale structures in the universe don't depend on the exact location of each star in each galaxy.
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Let's do a simulation to check your hypothesis! We'll only need a few billion more DEUSs.
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You're assuming they're using particles to represent atoms / quarks / whatever, in which case they'd be way short of simulating a speck of dust.
They're using a particle to represent a galaxy, which is a slightly lower resolution but still a valid simulation.
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So intergalactic space is modeled as what, completely empty? And dark matter and dark energy are modeled as what?
But maybe more interesting than that is how do you model the boundary conditions? What's beyond the end of simulated space and how do you model that? How do you model the fact that the universe has no fixed frame of reference?
Recursion (Score:2)
Does the simulated universe contain intelligent lifeforms who have built universe-simulating supercomputers?
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Why not? This one does.
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Fortunately the universe is simulated on windo..... Wow, I didn't know the last thing I saw would be white writing on a blue background.
In other news. I kind of doubt these muckabouts considered running the simulation with 4+ dimensional dark matter/energy.
It's like they don't even know that non-3d matter cannot interact directly with 3d matter except through gravitation! Ric Romero reporting...
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Does the simulated universe contain intelligent lifeforms who have built universe-simulating supercomputers?
Current replies:
No why should it? This one dosnt either
Why not? This one does.
I suppose that covers all the bases.
And when it returns a response of... (Score:2)
And when it returns a response of "42," Douglas Adams will die laughing...
no, wait...
Nice Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting to note that they didn't bother with too many gpu nodes. Reflects what we see with our users despite the abundance of marketing material from Nvidia.
5040 'standard' compute nodes: dual E5-2680 processors; 64GB RAM
360 'bulk' compute nodes: quad EX-X7560; 128GB RAM
144 GPU nodes: dual M2050
Another 90 'super' nodes on order: 128core, 512GB RAM
Cores: 103,680
GPUs: 288
Almost token GPU offering. These guys must do real work on it.
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Unless of course you count the 896 GPU cores per GPU node ( 448 cores per card, x2 per box, x144 boxes, for a cool 129,024 GPU cores).
Yeah, token GPU work... Seems to me like they appropriately sized the compute capabilities of what could be accellerated by cuda rather appropriately considering it's only a specific set of operations which can be accelerated by it in the first place.
Take a look at what gets accelerated by BOINC projects on NVIDIA / ATI GPU cores. Some projects cannot be sped up at all by CUD
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Sure. You can quote whatever numbers you like.
CPU Cores: 103, 680
GPU Cores: 129,024
Total machine is 2PetaFlop and the GPUs contribute less than 10% of that.
Look, I realise that for the right job, the GPU is superior. But it is not anywhere near what we are being led to believe (again, according to the marketing material). I sure the people commissioning this machine knew what they were doing and what they needed was raw x86_64 grunt.
I'm not interested in a single program's performance on the GPU. I'm in
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And that's not enough... if you want to simulate each quark individually (after all, you wrote "you take the number of particles").
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We have a pretty good grasp on the physics of a paperclip, even at the subatomic level. Since we know most of the rules, we can simplify the interactions. Eventually this kind of simulation the article talks about will be able to be run on a desktop computer once we can 'compress' it enough.
So this is where DEUS begins... (Score:1)
...and now I'm on the lookout for a girl with purple hair named Miang.
If one of those particles is inside my body (Score:1)
Is this real science? (Score:1)
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Is any genuine science being done here? Running simulations to model, say, the weather or ocean currents makes sense. You can calibrate them to past data and use them predictively. How does a simulation of the "universe" tell you anything?
Take the starting state and mechanisms suggested by theory, run it, compare the result to the actual universe now.
let's say simulation produced a result (Score:2)
How are they going to verify it experimentally?
I call BS (Score:2)
There are 3.34E22 molecules of H20 in one gram of water. That is a hundred billion or so times more particles that are in this simulation. Astro calcs have just been including more and more particles since the first one with 2 interacting particles. The number of (stars/solar systems/galaxies/clusters/super clusters etc) that each of those particles is supposed to represent has just been getting smaller as we have faster and faster computers.