A proposito de SH...

["Jaime Wilson" <jwilson@...>]

What is the structure of the
          universe? What is the origin of matter? Those
          questions have been pursued for centuries, with
          scientists like Galileo and Einstein employing
          telescopic technologies and intricately crafted
          theories to pursue the answer. Stephen Hawking,
          one of today's top astronomers, however, has a
          new tool that combines the best of technology and
          theory to explore the field: a supercomputer. 

          Earlier this week, Hawking and some colleagues at
          Cambridge University in the UK unveiled the
          world's first supercomputer dedicated exclusively
          to cosmological research. COSMOS, a Silicon
          Graphics Origin2000 symmetrical multiprocessor
          computer, employs 32 RS10000 processors and
          8 GB of main memory. Hawking said the
          high-powered supercomputer was needed
          because advances in cosmological theory are so
          complex. 

          "The calculations involved are so enormous they
          require a state-of-the-art machine," Hawking said,
          and questioned whether the supercomputer would
          one day eliminate theoretical physics by solving all
          the complex problems that face the field today. 

          COSMOS will be used by Hawking and
          astrophysicists at the universities of Cardiff,
          Durham, Oxford, and Sussex, as well as those at
          the Imperial College in London and the Royal
          Observatory in Edinburgh. 

          "We're trying to push back our understanding of
          the first few seconds of time, after the Big Bang,"
          said Dr. Paul Shellard, director of the UK
          Computational Cosmology Consortium. "We'll build
          computational models of the universe, and
          compare them to images from the Hubble Space
          Telescope and other sources. You can create
          models of the universe and rotate them. The
          computer has a great visualization capacity." 

          Shellard, who oversees the operations of the new
          computer, says the consortium chose the
          computer for a number of reasons: It is a new
          generation of supercomputer that has a scaleable
          shared memory architecture, rather than a
          distributed memory; and those who wished to
          operate the computer did not need to learn
          abstruse computer languages to program the
          processors, as is required in parallel processing
          supercomputers. "The software on this machine
          does it for you," said Shellard. 

          To put the power of the computer into perspective,
          Dr. John Peacock of the Royal Observatory of
          Edinburgh, said that computer programs running
          on the COSMOS can operate at speeds 50 times
          faster than on parallel processor-based
          computers. "This is very exciting. It means that
          questions which were previously unthinkably
          difficult can be answered in a few weeks," he said.