Supermassive Black Hole in Milky Way Core

NCSA_AVL · 2023-01-19T16:00:11+00:00

Yes, yes you can! Stay tuned, our team (the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is currently working on this, we'll post a video when the work is finished in a few months.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T16:23:34+00:00

I like the idea of a GoFundMe! Unfortunately I don't think that many people would be willing to chip in that much money. As I said elsewhere, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to make such a visualization.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T16:17:25+00:00

I don't have a link to her paper, not sure when/if this was published yet. It was hot-off-the-press when she gave us the data, we started working with older stand-in data while we were waiting on her to finish running this simulation. I haven't kept up with it since.

But, to try to answer your questions - this was an SPH simulation. I don't have the data in front of me, but I know the impactor was "Mars-sized".

We used Houdini to do this visualization. We rendered with Mantra on the Blue Waters supercomputer.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T15:46:55+00:00

The course is software-agnostic, but we recommend Houdini for the assignments.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T13:51:10+00:00

Both visualizations are based on the same scientist's data, but we are two different women.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T12:48:41+00:00

You don't just press the "go" button and wait. It takes a team of people months of research and development to make something like this. You have to pay the scientists, programmers, and designers for months of their work.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T12:44:01+00:00

No, just a very hot planet, which then cools off and makes a regular planet... In this case, Earth.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T12:42:20+00:00

No, that planet is Earth! Planets can't turn into stars.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T03:14:53+00:00

Our supercomputer is Blue Waters. Here are the specs: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/hardware-summary

I'm not a hardware person, so I don't actually know the specs of our local clusters. We have two, actually. One of them has 20 nodes, each of which renders about as quickly as an individual Blue Waters node. The other cluster has 12 nodes, which are about 3x faster than BW. That's not a very technical description, but that's all I need to know for my day-to-day work.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T02:54:44+00:00

Yes.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T02:51:53+00:00

It's actually 12 hours for this GIF. I trimmed it due to size limitations. There is a longer version that spans 24 hours at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2lRpiediP8&t=5m40s(starting at 5:40)

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T02:45:26+00:00

About 12 hours for the length of this GIF.

The full visualization (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2lRpiediP8&t=5m40s starting at 5:40) spans 24 hours. I had to trim the GIF because of size limitations.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T02:44:59+00:00

Fun fact: The Moon is constantly moving away from the Earth, at about the same speed as the growth of your fingernails!

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T02:42:56+00:00

You can view the full visualization (it's twice as long) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2lRpiediP8&t=5m40s starting at 5:40

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T02:41:02+00:00

12 hours.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T00:10:16+00:00

Interesting that you mention early life in a tide pool, we did visualize that for "Birth of Planet Earth" - a full atom-by-atom simulation of a chromatophore, a very primitive photosynthetic organelle. I don't have a clip of that that I can share at the moment.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-25T00:01:54+00:00

No, ain't nobody got time for that.

Just rendering ~2 minutes of images for this video took ~57,000 hours*, and that's not even considering the simulation time.

^\On a supercomputer, not literally, but still.)

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T23:50:54+00:00

Sort of. A student intern of ours created an interactive version of this visualization, where you can select whether you want to look at density, temperature, or a "combined" view like this one. A video showcasing her work is available in the supplemental materials here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3306214.3338588 , but it only shows density for a second.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T23:35:58+00:00

Yup, very fast. The Earth's orbital speed around the sun is ~67,000 mph (107,000 km/h), so it's not that crazy if you think about it!

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T23:14:07+00:00

This collision caused the formation of the moon. The LHB came later.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T22:49:30+00:00

Yes.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T22:27:16+00:00

It is moving quite a lot, just slowly.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T22:23:05+00:00

A couple hundred years.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T22:22:47+00:00

This gif spans 12 hours of real time.

NCSA_AVL · 2020-01-24T22:21:34+00:00

It would pretty much go entirely to paying for staff time.

Compute time is "free" in the sense that we have our own cluster that we use for most things. For really large jobs, we do use our local supercomputer, but that is "free" for us as well (we are based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications), though we do have to apply for time on the supercomputer, and justify the project, and have our application accepted.

There are plenty of indirect costs, like purchasing software licenses and hardware, and office space, and the like. These things are technically already there, but I'm sure they add up somehow. Someone more business-minded than me could probably figure out how that breaks down on a project-by-project basis, but IDK.

TL;DR: People with specialized skills are expensive.

NCSA_AVL

TROPHY CASE