How many petaflops do you need for Matrix?
The power of supercomputers is very close to the line when it becomes possible to render the model of the physical world in real time. This opinion was expressed by Michael McGuigan from the Brookhaven National Laboratory . According to him, after a few years, supercomputers will be able to pass the “graphical Turing test”, that is, to create a virtual reality that a person cannot distinguish from the physical world.
In principle, supercomputers are already capable of rendering realistic video that is indistinguishable from reality. The only problem is that such rendering requires hours, days and weeks of continuous calculations. To pass the graphic Turing test, McGuigan says, computers must render in real time at 30 frames / sec.
To test the capabilities of modern technology, Michael McGuigan took advantage of his official position and started calculating virtual reality on one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, BlueGene / L, which is installed in the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This cluster of 18 cabinets, each with 2048 processors and a terabyte of RAM, has a capacity of 103 teraflops (103 trillion floating point operations per second).
It turned out that Tachyon 0.98, a program for modeling natural lighting, runs on a cluster of 6144 processors about 822 times faster than on a regular PC (it is not very well optimized for parallelization of calculations). Here is a table showing the rendering time of a single 17.6 megapixel frame with a size of 4548 x 3860. On a regular Pentium IV with a clock frequency of 3 GHz, the calculation takes 2171 seconds, that is 36 minutes.
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Using the full power of the supercomputer and with normal parallelization, the program is already quite capable of performing calculations in real time, so that a person cannot distinguish between a virtual lighting model and a real one.
The calculation of the lighting is very important, but far from the only problem that needs to be solved in order to pass the graphic Turing test. The second necessary component is high-resolution animation in real-time mode, but this task is in the teeth of future supercomputers. According to McGuigan, the first petaflop supercomputers with a capacity of more than 1000 teraflops will be capable of deceiving a person. They will appear very soon.
The results of his research, Michael McGuigan published in the scientific work “Toward the Graphics of the Blue Gene Supercomputer” ( PDF ).
Of course, not everyone agrees with such bold statements. Critics object to McGuigan that the reality surrounding us is deeper than one pixel , that is, rendering visible pixels to the eye is possible only if we count all the physical processes that are invisible to the human eye. To simulate a person’s walking, it is necessary to model the entire system of internal organs, up to the calculation of blood circulation. This is not just an animation. It will require much more computing power than 1 petaflops.
In principle, supercomputers are already capable of rendering realistic video that is indistinguishable from reality. The only problem is that such rendering requires hours, days and weeks of continuous calculations. To pass the graphic Turing test, McGuigan says, computers must render in real time at 30 frames / sec.
To test the capabilities of modern technology, Michael McGuigan took advantage of his official position and started calculating virtual reality on one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, BlueGene / L, which is installed in the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This cluster of 18 cabinets, each with 2048 processors and a terabyte of RAM, has a capacity of 103 teraflops (103 trillion floating point operations per second).
It turned out that Tachyon 0.98, a program for modeling natural lighting, runs on a cluster of 6144 processors about 822 times faster than on a regular PC (it is not very well optimized for parallelization of calculations). Here is a table showing the rendering time of a single 17.6 megapixel frame with a size of 4548 x 3860. On a regular Pentium IV with a clock frequency of 3 GHz, the calculation takes 2171 seconds, that is 36 minutes.
')
Using the full power of the supercomputer and with normal parallelization, the program is already quite capable of performing calculations in real time, so that a person cannot distinguish between a virtual lighting model and a real one.
The calculation of the lighting is very important, but far from the only problem that needs to be solved in order to pass the graphic Turing test. The second necessary component is high-resolution animation in real-time mode, but this task is in the teeth of future supercomputers. According to McGuigan, the first petaflop supercomputers with a capacity of more than 1000 teraflops will be capable of deceiving a person. They will appear very soon.
The results of his research, Michael McGuigan published in the scientific work “Toward the Graphics of the Blue Gene Supercomputer” ( PDF ).
Of course, not everyone agrees with such bold statements. Critics object to McGuigan that the reality surrounding us is deeper than one pixel , that is, rendering visible pixels to the eye is possible only if we count all the physical processes that are invisible to the human eye. To simulate a person’s walking, it is necessary to model the entire system of internal organs, up to the calculation of blood circulation. This is not just an animation. It will require much more computing power than 1 petaflops.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/22909/
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