The Future of Physics

[danalwyn]

Of some interest:

I was listening to some of the Lattice QCD guys today at work. They've been having some problems, since Lattice QCD has some problems that are ridiculously computationally intensive (think in terms of hundreds of years on a regular computer). To do them, they need computer clusters that can do a large number of brute-force calculations in a second. Such processors are not commonly available as CPUs, but they do exist, and the cluster they've built uses common, commericially available components.

The next generation cluster may run entirely on PlayStation 3s.

There are days when I love physics.

Comments

[ithmarvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, the CELL processors on the PS3s are incredibly fast kick-ass processors, or so I've heard. All I know is that it's going to be a major boon for the Folding@Home guys.

It would be pretty damn expensive, though.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Maybe we can get a bulk discount on the CELLs and the video cards. Anyway, it can't be any more expensive than what we already have. They have racks of NVIDIA 7900 GTX cards doing the calculations at the moment, since each calculation may involve several Teraflop-years.

[avendya.livejournal.com]

I knew there was a reason I loved this subject.

[skyshark.livejournal.com]

Well, you CAN'T HAVE MINE. *hoards her future PS!*

[john-yik.livejournal.com]

Lattice QCD sounds interesting. I must confess to being disappointed after checking out Wikipedia to find that it's *not* the chromodynamics of protons and neutrons packed into a crystal lattice--though admittedly that doesn't sound very likely even to my ears. Only situation I can think of involving that would be inside a very large nucleus. Or neutronium.

Out of curiosity, what sort of calculations are they doing? Is it very complex math, or do they just need to simulate a large number of particles interacting all at once?

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Here's where I have to confess to ignorance, being an experimentalist who normally doesn't have to deal with this problem. I think their model involves describing particle interactions in extremely large matricies (somehow different from the standard way of doing it, I don't know how). As such, they may need to perform large-scale matrix inversions in order to do a calculation, which are perhaps the most computationally intensive projects known to mankind. Since they may be trying to simulate production at the LHC at some level, this could be a lot of matricies to invert. This is why they need brute power instead of finesse.

However, I'm not sure. I just know that they need a lot of teraflops.