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Basically "visualizing black holes with relativistic ray tracing" is my hobby now. I can't think of a better use of compute, honestly. The way it was explained

Basically "visualizing black holes with relativistic ray tracing" is my hobby now. I can't think of a better use of compute, honestly. The way it was explained to me: we can simulate a single black hole, all the photons together by gravity alone, on a Lambda workstation. To simulate two black holes in orbit, requires Berkeley Lab's Perlmutter, the biggest supercomputer on the planet. By the time we get to three black holes in orbit, it's so chaotic it doesn't matter if are afforded all the energy in the universe, it would not be enough to calculate predicatble orbits. Cosmological simulations are the benchmark. And the outputs are the building blocks of life itself: dark matter & energy ;)

Frost1x 5y ago
5th largest (depending on what we're measuring size of): https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2021/11/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2021/11/ Which is still of course incredibly impressive, but I wouldn't say biggest, maybe 'one of the biggest' is fair. Even that's constrained by 'known' -- some private companies especially in fossil fuel and tech companies have systems larger either dedicated or allocatable. You can also do black hole simulations (orbit and merger) on far smaller systems. I worked with a physicist who did these numeric relativity sims on smaller systems, you simply lose fidelity (also depends on how you treat the singularity). Our visualizations looked like cartoons compared to these beautiful renderings though.