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Democracy

Back: Graphics

https://blog.bomorgan.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/democracy.m4v

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.

Population CPU speed GPU speed
8 billion    
3 billion 1.5 billion / second  
1.5 billion 1.5 billion / second 2.2 billion / second
1 billion 1.5 billion / second 2.4 billion / second
512 million 1.5 billion / second 2.9 billion / second
256 million 1.5 billion / second 4.2 billion / second
128 million 1.5 billion / second 15.4 billion / second
64 million 1.5 billion / second 16.8 billion / second
32 million 1.5 billion / second 17.7 billion / second
16 million 1.5 billion / second 18.2 billion / second
8 million 1.5 billion / second 18.2 billion / second
4 million 1.7 billion / second 17.5 billion / second
2 million 3.2 billion / second 16.3 billion / second
1 million 5.7 billion / second 14.0 billion / second
512 thousand 5.6 billion / second 11.4 billion / second
256 thousand 2.3 billion / second 9.0 billion / second
128 thousand 2.0 billion / second 5.4 billion / second
64 thousand 1.7 billion / second 3.0 billion / second
32 thousand 0.9 billion / second 1.5 billion / second

2022.11.25

 

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