[ODE] Your thoughts on "Physics Accellerators"

[Gary R. Van Sickle]

> Do you guys think it would be good idea to have special hardware that
> can do dynamics calculations in hardware, like the was graphics cards to
> graphics now?
>
> Like, would it be a good idea to take something like ode and make it
> into a computer board?
>

Actually I think it would be more helpful to implement full-blown
double-precision 4x4 matrix operations in a coprocessor.  Things are certainly
heading in this direction, but there's still a long ways to go until we get to
single-cycle matrix multiplies ;-) (see
http://www.sc2001.org/papers/pap.pap313.pdf for example).  This would hugely
benefit not only ODE, but virtually any scientific app, and I'm sure plenty of
less-scientific ones as well.

--
Gary R. Van Sickle
Brewer.  Patriot.