Supercomputer simulates black hole collision | Tech News on ZDNet
When two black holes collide, space shivers like Jell-O. With the help of a supercomputer to simulate this event, NASA seeks to prove Albert Einstein’s theories and unveil universe’s secrets.The NASA supercomputer Columbia just performed its largest astrophysical calculation ever; a 3D simulation of two black holes merging. “This merger is a cataclysmic event, second only to the Big Bang in the amount of energy it produces,” Joan Centrella, chief of the NASA Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory in Greenbelt, Md., said Tuesday in a press teleconference…
…NASA researchers have managed to transform the theory into mathematical algorithms and run through it through Columbia, thefourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. Its 2,032 interconnected 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors ran for 80 hours, in an operation that would have taken 18 years for a single processor to perform.
Who said those room filling computers where a waste of space?
Tags: Interesting, Science, Space, Technology
