With supercomputers capable of beating our best chess and Jeopardy players, you’d think that being able to simulate the sounds a tire makes while rolling on a road was easy—but it’s not. In fact, Yokohama had to team up with the Japanese equivalent of NASA to finally recreate how air and sound behave around the company’s tires.
     |
We were once toddlers before. We’ve gotten drunk as recent as a few days ago. We maybe got too sore from working out. And we’re not always perfectly balanced. We know how awkward it can be sometimes to just… walk. It’s okay! It’s not always as easy as it looks! Look, even computer simulations tasked to figure out how to walk sometimes fall face down on the floor.
| |
The incredibly lifelike computer simulations of snow
| |
This amazing video shows a NASA-created simulation of the entire life of a single disk galaxy—all the way from the Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago to the present time. More »
We’ve all been at a huge outdoor event which renders our phone useless, with no available bandwidth to make calls or check a map. That’s why Sandia Labs has built this giant cluster, to simulate large networks of phones and make sure they place nicely together. More »
We’ve seen some large-scale simulations, including some that couldn’t get larger. Simulated cellular networks are still a rare breed, however, which makes Sandia National Laboratories’ MegaDroid project all the more important. The project’s cluster of off-the-shelf PCs emulates a town of 300,000 Android phones down to their cellular and GPS behavior, all with the aim of tracing the wider effects of natural disasters, hacking attempts and even simple software bugs. Researchers imagine the eventually public tool set being useful not just for app developers, but for the military and mesh network developers — the kind who’d need to know how their on-the-field networks are running even when local authorities try to shut them down. MegaDroid is still very much an in-progress effort, although Sandia Labs isn’t limiting its scope to Android and can see its work as relevant to iOS or any other platform where a ripple in the network can lead to a tidal wave of problems.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Alt, Google
Sandia Labs’ MegaDroid project simulates 300,000 Android phones to fight wireless catastrophes (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
New York Times | 
Sandia National Laboratories | Email this | Comments
Every last detail can help make a computer-generated character seem more realistic. So a team of researchers at Cornell University have developed a simulator that can accurately recreate the sound of cloth so that the CG characters you see on screen also sound as authentic as possible. More »
Are animations of Curiosity’s Mars landing not enough to feed your space exploration appetite? Try this on for size: a group of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have generated what’s billed as a full-fledged simulation of the universe. Arepo, the software behind the sim, took the observed afterglow of the big bang as its only input and sped things up by 14 billion years. The result was a model of the cosmos peppered with realistically depicted galaxies that look like our own and those around us. Previous programs created unseemly blobs of stars instead of the spiral galaxies that were hoped for because they divided space into cubes of fixed size and shape. Arepo’s secret to producing accurate visualizations is its geometry; a grid that moves and flexes to mirror the motions of dark energy, dark matter, gasses and stars. Video playback of the celestial recreation clocks in at just over a minute, but it took Harvard’s 1,024-core Odyssey super computer months to churn out. Next on the group’s docket is tackling larger portions of the universe at a higher resolution. Head past the jump for the video and full press release, or hit the source links below for the nitty-gritty details in the team’s trio of scholarly papers.
Filed under: Science
Scientists create simulation of the universe, reenact 14 billion years in a few months (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink PhysOrg | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cornell University Library (1), (2), (3) | Email this | Comments
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
