Talk-Polywell.org

It's somewhat interesting in that the authors took the approach of adding precision one step at a time, not unlike what you were suggesting elsewhere, MSimon. They thought that further speedups could be made by doing a first iteration using half-precision.

The magnetic field keeps them away.

drmike, here's the core of their approach from the paper you linked to: We present a mixed precision defect correction algorithm for the iterative solution of linear equation systems. The core idea of the algorithm is to split the solution process into a computationally intensive but less precise in...

I'm gonna grind on theory, I'd love to know what you guys (any gals out there???) think about how to grind it out. I was looking at pricing for the NVIDIA Tesla online... about $2k/copy for 1 TFLOP, if you like your FLOPs in single-precision. The link you posted to the 64-bit thread about using mul...

Acceleware seems to be building whole systems bundled with third-party software bolted on: http://www.acceleware.com/about/overview_LoLC8h.cfm They claim with the latest NVIDIA card, the Tesla, they can get near to 1 TFLOP: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34656/135/ Here's the NVIDIA page for th...

MSimon wrote:All Rostoker has at this time is a paper machine. He doesn't have experiment 1.

As I recall the early money is going towards simulations.

Which is why what Bussard did (assuming it can be replicated, and I think that shouldn't be much of a trick) is more impressive.

My other worry is whether alphas will sputter material from the grid too fast. Even if it's just boron, the rate has to be less than five ions per alpha impact or the core will flood. Anyone know if I'm worrying over nothing here? I'm pretty sure the correct answer is "no, nobody really knows". I d...

You would be shocked at how much ignorance is out there. I spoke with a top research manager at a well-known Wall Street firm last week and he had never heard of IEC prior to our conversation. His eyes lit up when I mentioned the Rostoker/Monkton group at Tri-Alpha Energy getting $40M from Gates and...

93143 wrote:The grid does repel any ions unfortunate enough to upscatter past it. This is a loss mechanism.

Yes... isn't this the thermalization problem Rider mentioned as a primary loss mechanism?

Clearspeed has a floating-point accelerator that will turn your desktop into a floating-point monster. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/10/60791 That five-year-old Wired story is obsolete... Clearspeed's latest product, the e620, puts 80 GFLOPS on your desktop. http://www.clearspee...

The first nuclear reactors were built with slide rules and 10 digit accuracy lookup tables. I think the toys we have on our desks are quite sufficient to build a fusion reactor. True that. But how much better the toys available for just a bit more! Our hardware guy tells me that we're paying ~$6k f...

Huh. I was gonna walk over to UCLA later today to see if I could crib a copy of W.M. Nevin's 1995 critique. Something else to see if I can scrounge. Edit: The quote in toto: A quick comment on Mr. Katz's statement [a comment referring to Rider and Nevin's early 90's work]: I presume that he is refer...

Setting up a distributed grid would be interesting. I have a feeling the most immediate problem wouldn't be memory space, it would be OS. I run Linux and MacOS at home, and I suspect most people run Windows.

Rider's claim that the system would collapse to equilibrium before fusion could occur seems to be definitively proven wrong by the WB-6 results, if I understand that correctly. Did he ever say that, though? His point was that energy loss would always be higher than energy output unless you could fi...

I've set the switch to allow HTML in my posts but it doesn't seem to be allowing it. Can somebody fix this, or is this a policy?