Despite only ranking in at number 145 on the Top 500 rank of supercomputers around the world, and coming in as the third Australian supercomputer on the list, the CSIRO’s GPU-based machine managed to rank in as the 11th greenest supercomputer on the list. This video gives a really good insight into exactly what the scientists are creating with their super science powers.
Amazing to think how far a piece of gaming hardware has developed science technology in the past few years…
[YouTube]
Columbus Ohio Dentist
Monday, November 22, 2010 at 4:55 PMWhat constitutes a super computer? I’m sure it’s faster than mine.
matt
Monday, November 22, 2010 at 5:43 PMhuh. so the CSIRO have just started doing what games programmers have been doing for years.
bring on quantum computers.
Andy
Monday, November 22, 2010 at 11:58 PMBut how many frames per second would I get on Xonotic?
Interesting
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 8:42 AMI might be wrong and feel free to correct me, but I’m not certain we are looking to ‘improve the quality of wheat worldwide’ … just seem to be more issues that might need addressing than improving the worlds wheat…?
StevoTheDevo
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 10:44 AMThe world’s population is set to double in the next 50 years of something insane!!!
The world will need to provide sufficient energy in the form of food to sustain those 5 billion new mouths.
The most energy dense and plentiful source for humans is fat/oil, the second most energy dense and plentiful food is starch and one of the most common sources of starch is from Wheat…
When they talk of improved quality of wheat they’re talking improved yield per hectare.
Mike Biggs
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 11:05 AMYeah wheat quality doesnt seem really important next to curing cancer or AIDs, but wheat makes up 20% of all food consumed worldwide, so I guess thats important :)
Michael
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 11:19 AMWhat the hell, man?
We have, on the average, 1 person dying every second as a result, either directly or indirectly, of hunger (straight from wikipedia)
There is no greater problem in the world than starvation, and to suggest otherwise makes me sad at the mentality of those living in the first world.
Sarah
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 6:11 PMHi Guys,
Actually the work CSIRO is doing is about looking at the wheat genome and searching for all the regions (genes) that control a wide range of important traits in wheat.
We also want to make sure that wheat will be able to withstand drought and make a viable crop as environmental conditions change, or breed a wheat variety that can be grown in areas where it couldn’t previously so it can feed growing populations.
CSIRO is looking to breed a wheat species that has all the traits of disease resistance, drought tolerance, good grain quality (for better baking and tasting bread), salt tolerance and water use efficency (so it could grow in soils that might be saline or don’t recieve much water)
The wheat breeding experiments involve crossing 4 parents for 1000 different wheat plants so as you can imagine it is a massive computational challenge searching through the genome of 1000 plants for up to 25 different genes that code for these traits.
Also wheat has a genome much larger than the human genome so this is where the CSIRO’s GPU cluster comes in.. It cuts the computation time down from hours to a matter of seconds. It means scientists can get their results almost instantly and can get on with their jobs without waiting for their desktop computer to slowly spit out their results.
Hope this answers your questions :-) For more info check out the website http://csiro.au/science/cereal-varieties-crop-management.html
James Mac
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 10:43 AMSure… but can it run Crysis?