[Beowulf] coprocessor to do "physics calculations"

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 01:09:07PM -0700, Jim Lux wrote:
> Ran across an interesting device:
> http://physx.ageia.com/
> 
> It's some sort of coprocessor (marketed to the gaming community) that looks 
> like its designed to efficiently numerically integrate equations of 
> motion.  Clever idea.  Not much substantive info in the whitepaper.
> http://physx.ageia.com/whitepaper_avanced_gaming_physics.pdf

Of course, next-generation vertex shaders target the
same ecological niche. But affordable gaming hardware accelerating
physical simulations is distinctly Good News.

Unrelatedly, OpenCroquet allows remote synchronization of distributed
simulation instances. It's based on Squeak (SmallTalk), but can in 
theory allocate masters (which might be accelerated, or have hardware
entropy) replicating world state to slaves. (Of course, if the world
state is rich, the replication incurs high costs, especially if over WAN).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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