Layers of Reflection

Back: Graphics

I’m inspired by the ability of modern computer graphics cards to run large parallel simulations, so I set myself the goal of simulating 8 billion people using a graphics card in pursuit of creating a global democracy simulation for better understanding distributed democracy.

My first experiment simulating a large number of people is to consider each person to have a position and a velocity.  I’ve implemented a basic particle simulation for 128 million particles, each particle using 8 bytes, or 2 RGBA pixels, of video texture memory.  Without rendering the simulation to the screen, the GPU runs at a maximum speed of ~18 billion particle simulations per second.  The rendering above is only showing 1/1024th of the total number of particles simulated because the screen becomes solid white if all 128 million are rendered.

I have not yet reached my goal of simulating 8 billion particles for a realistic democracy simulation, but I’ve learned a lot about tradeoffs between GPU and CPU memory processing sweet spots.

2022.11.25