snyders

“We used the equivalent of 30,000 desktop computers to allow Agentinosaurus to take its first steps in over 94 million years,” added co-author Dr Lee Margetts, also from the University of Manchester."

"The simulation was performed using our in-house open source simulator, GaitSym. The software and the model specification files can be downloaded from www.animalsimulation.org. The simulation runs at about half real time on a modern processor, so a typical simulation run takes about 30 seconds of CPU core time. A single optimisation run requires 100,000 repeats of the simulation run, and typically 30 repeats of the bootstrap process are needed to get convergence. This equates to about 25,000 CPU core hours for each run condition tested. We had access to the HECToR, the UK National Supercomputer Service (www.hector.ac.uk) and were able to access up to 32,768 CPU cores at any one time. Our previous traditional genetic algorithm implementation was very successful up to 512 cores but did not scale well for use with larger numbers of cores."

UK National Supercomputer is in danger.