Durham Uni and Dell co-design systems to help model the universe

The James Webb Space Telescope has served up impressive views of the cosmos since the first images were revealed back in July, but it is also providing data to other scientific endeavors, including cosmology projects such as those at Durham University in the northeast of England. Durham is part of the Distributed Research …

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought I'd heard somewhere that the Unis involved in this are setting 100Gb/s links between them to shift the data around.

[xyz]

Sounds like they have just about enough ram...

To run windows 11.

[Korev]

Re: Sounds like they have just about enough ram...

Or even three whole tabs in Chrome...

[that one in the corner]

Great bunch of lads

Before you-know-what Durham ran a great series of public Saturday morning science lectures.

Chatting to the guys who created and ran these cosmos models after their lecture (we got tea and biscuits, very civilised), I asked whether they collaborated with the Computer Science guys to help optimise the code and run a few more simulated millennia per week. Their answer: nah, the hardware just gets upgraded! Then articles like this one get written - everyone wins!

Then again, they did also demo a booth built for science fairs, school tours and so forth. You have a set of knobs and levers to set basic constants (amount of dark matter, strength of the nuclear forces, little things like that) and it shows you an animated simulation of how the cosmos would develop under those conditions - would galaxies form or would all the matter just sit around as cosmic smog? And that was running on nothing more than a Raspberry Pi [1](couldn't even have been a mk 3 Pi!)! If they can do *that*...

[1] okay, *maybe* the Pi was just selecting a pre-rendered video based upon the inputs selected, but what kind of misery guts wants to look behind the curtain like that?