Jump to content
Goodbye Jesus

Computer graphics card simulates


nivek

Recommended Posts

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

Goodbye Jesus

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

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

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

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? :scratch:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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?  :scratch:

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... :grin:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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... :grin:

 

I was semi-serious, I didn't buy my video card to run windows! Hehe, imagine blue screens of death for the video card... :HaHa: Then it stops working and you have no clue what the message was!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was semi-serious, I didn't buy my video card to run windows! Hehe, imagine blue screens of death for the video card...  :HaHa: 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

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 :dance:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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  :dance:

Yup. Blue Screen is the Scream of the dying OS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines.