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

[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.