From the post:
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Senior researchers Vladimir Pomerantcev and Olga Rubtsova, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Kukulin (SINP MSU), were able to use on an ordinary desktop PC with GPU to solve complicated integral equations of quantum mechanics — previously solved only with the powerful, expensive supercomputers. According to Vladimir Kukulin, the personal computer does the job much faster: in 15 minutes it is doing the work requiring normally 2-3 days of the supercomputer time.…
The main problem in solving the scattering equations of multiple quantum particles was the calculation of the integral kernel — a huge two-dimensional table, consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of rows and columns, with each element of such a huge matrix being the result of extremely complex calculations. But this table appeared to look like a monitor screen with tens of billions of pixels, and with a good GPU it was quite possible to calculate all of these. Using the software developed in Nvidia and having written their own programs, the researchers split their calculations on the many thousands of streams and were able to solve the problem brilliantly.
“We reached the speed we couldn’t even dream of,” Vladimir Kukulin said. “The program computes 260 million of complex double integrals on a desktop computer within three seconds only. No comparison with supercomputers! My colleague from the University of Bochum in Germany (recently deceased, mournfully), whose lab did the same, carried out the calculations by one of the largest supercomputers in Germany with the famous blue gene architecture that is actually very expensive. And what his group is seeking for two or three days, we do in 15 minutes without spending a dime.”
The most amazing thing is that the desired quality of graphics processors and a huge amount of software to them exist for ten years already, but no one used them for such calculations, preferring supercomputers. Anyway, our physicists surprised their Western counterparts pretty much.
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One of the principal beneficiaries of the US restricting the export of the latest generation of computer technology to the former USSR, was of course Russia.
Deprived of the latest hardware, Russian mathematicians and computer scientists were forced to be more efficient with equipment that was one or two generations off the latest mark for computing.
Parity between the USSR and the USA in nuclear weapons is testimony to their success and the failure of US export restriction policies.
For the technical details: V.N. Pomerantsev, V.I. Kukulin, O.A. Rubtsova, S.K. Sakhiev. Fast GPU-based calculations in few-body quantum scattering. Computer Physics Communications, 2016; 204: 121 DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2016.03.018.
Will a GPU help you startle your colleagues in the near future?
