SFI had one of these for a while. (As far as I know it just sat there.)
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/im/cam8/
Nowadays GPUs are used for Lattice Boltzmann.
such a blast-from-past with the awesome 90's stylized web page and the
pics of the SUN (and Apollo?) workstations!
CAM8 is clearly the legacy of Margolis' work (MIT). At the time (1983)
I remember handwired/soldered breadboards and I think banks of memory
chips wired through logic gates and such... I think this was pre SUN
days (I had an M68000 Wicat Unix box on my desktop which sported a
massive 5MB hard drive with pruned down BSD variant installed on it).
In fact, that was where I ran the MT simulations (tuning rules until I
got "interesting" activity, running parameter sweeps, etc).
When GPUs first rose up (SGI) they seemed hyper-apropriate to the
purpose but alas, I had not spare cycles at that point in my career to
look into it. Just a few years ago when I was working on the Micoy
Omnistereoscopic "camera ball" (you mentioned it looked a bit like
coronavirus particle) I had specced out an FPGA fabric solution (with a
dedicated FPGA wired directly between every adjacent overlapping camera
pair - 52 cameras) to do realtime image de-distortion/stitching with the
special considerations which stereo vison adds. I never became a VHDL
programmer but I did become familiar with the paradigm... I think I
tried to engage Roger at a Wedtech on the topic when he was (also)
investigating FPGAs. (circa 2016?)
At that time, my fascination with CA had evolved into variations on
Gosper's Hashlife... so GPU and FPGA fabric didn't seem as apt, though
TPUs do seem (more) apt for the implicit data structures (hashed
quad-trees).
The new nVidia DGX concentrated TPU system for $3k is fascinating and
triggers my thoughts (not very coherent) about the tradeoffs between
power and entropy and "complexity".
A dive down this 1983/4 rabbit hole lead me (also) to the /Toffoli/ and
/Fredkin Gates/ and /Reversible Computing. /More on that in a few
billion more neural/GPT cycles...
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
