♦ nivek ♦ Posted June 10, 2005 Share Posted June 10, 2005 http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7508 Computer graphics card simulates supernova collapse New software enabling scientists to perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations and see the results rendered almost instantly on their screens has been released by US researchers. The Scout programming language, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in California, US, lets scientists run complex calculations on a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) instead of its central processing unit (CPU). In tests, the graphics processor was able to perform certain types of calculation 12 times faster than a single CPU. Graphics processors generate smooth and realistic three-dimensional imagery by performing rapid calculations on visual data. And the latest graphics chips rival CPUs for raw processing power, thanks to consumer demand for hardware powerful enough to support the latest 3D computer games. "These chips normally sit idle when scientists work," says Patrick McCormick, a LANL researcher. "They have all this processing power but it's just not being used." McCormick says researchers could use the Scout programming language to simulate various phenomena, such as ocean currents and the formation of galaxies. He adds that performing these calculations on a graphics processor makes it simple to render simulations visually at the same time. Super-giant star Researchers at LANL have already tested Scout by modelling a critical moment during a particularly spectacular astronomical event: a "core-collapse supernova". The simulations ran 12 times faster than they do on a single CPU, McCormick says, primarily because the problem is so well suited to a graphics processors' capabilities. The researchers simulated the shockwave produced after the core of a super-giant star collapses upon itself. The collapse occurs when a gravitationally unstable iron core has been generated by fusion reactions inside the star. A video produced by LANL shows the Scout code used to model the shockwave, alongside a graphical representation of the process. To make the technology much more powerful, McCormick is working on a version of Scout that will work when several computers are linked together. Floating point Peter Schröder, a computer simulation expert at the California Institute of Technology, believes graphics processors have great potential for scientific research. "There is a real market driving this hardware that we can use for scientific computation," he told New Scientist. Schröder adds that the approach is particularly well suited to "anything that has high floating-point needs with low communication needs" - in other words intensive mathematical calculations that can be easily split up into individual portions. This is because graphics chips contain many individual processing cores that are suited to performing intensive calculations on their own. But some experts say graphics chips' design means they will not perform as well as CPUs on less specialised tasks. "For general-purpose scientific computing, GPUs have not proven themselves yet," says Jack Dongarra, a supercomputing expert at the University of Tennessee, US. Computer Science, University of Tennessee http://www.cs.utk.edu/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spamandham Posted June 16, 2005 Share Posted June 16, 2005 That's awesome! I work in a compute intensive field, and we never thought of using graphics processors as compute engines. That's what we get for having too much money to throw at problems! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
been borg again Posted June 17, 2005 Share Posted June 17, 2005 kick ass, how cool is it to realize all of our Elements were produced by collapsing and exploding layers&shells of a supernova star? Who says Science is boring and takes the spiritual fun out of Reality? Imagine at one time in the past, all of the Carbon of Humanity was created in a single explosive event. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Neil Posted June 18, 2005 Share Posted June 18, 2005 Personally, I don't know what Christians are talking about when they say that. Science is all kinds of fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Helmet Posted June 19, 2005 Share Posted June 19, 2005 Does that mean that it'll be illegal to install Windows on dual processor motherboards if the graphic card's processor does some of the work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted June 20, 2005 Share Posted June 20, 2005 Does that mean that it'll be illegal to install Windows on dual processor motherboards if the graphic card's processor does some of the work? Nah, the Windows version you wont use more CPUs then the license says, and Windows is not using the GPU for any OS processing stuff anyway. But maybe you were just joking here, and I totally missed it, which is not unusuall, and in that case I would just go quiet and slowly walk backwards through the mudhole I came through, and pretend no one saw me... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Helmet Posted June 20, 2005 Share Posted June 20, 2005 Nah, the Windows version you wont use more CPUs then the license says, and Windows is not using the GPU for any OS processing stuff anyway. But maybe you were just joking here, and I totally missed it, which is not unusuall, and in that case I would just go quiet and slowly walk backwards through the mudhole I came through, and pretend no one saw me... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I was semi-serious, I didn't buy my video card to run windows! Hehe, imagine blue screens of death for the video card... Then it stops working and you have no clue what the message was! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted June 23, 2005 Share Posted June 23, 2005 I was semi-serious, I didn't buy my video card to run windows! Hehe, imagine blue screens of death for the video card... Then it stops working and you have no clue what the message was! Hehe. That would be the Nothing Singularity that was before Planck time of the Big Bang. You have an error, but you don't know what it is. The Invisible Blue Screen of the Unknown Error. Well, it happened to me a couple of times that the whole computer just shut down, without warning or anything. Just <bzzt> and it was off. Until I discovered that there was to much dust in the fan, so it was running to hot, and the CPU basically made a "I can't breathe anymore! I'll die now!". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Helmet Posted June 23, 2005 Share Posted June 23, 2005 haha yeah exactly what I was thinking, the cpu overheating and rebooting to escape destruction. Aren't MS blue screen unknown errors anyways? I have a theory that the blue screen of death produces random error messages to conceal the fact that it is just crap and doesn't work Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted June 23, 2005 Share Posted June 23, 2005 haha yeah exactly what I was thinking, the cpu overheating and rebooting to escape destruction. Aren't MS blue screen unknown errors anyways? I have a theory that the blue screen of death produces random error messages to conceal the fact that it is just crap and doesn't work Yup. Blue Screen is the Scream of the dying OS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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