Need good graphics for a research project modeling the electrophysiology of myocardium? Well, sometimes the best ideas come from adapting existing technology used for the gaming community:Dr Simon Scarle, a researcher on the Warwick team, used a single Xbox 360 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) to model how electrical signals were transmitted through damaged heart cells.Maybe this is how we can start to recruit more teens for the basic sciences...
The chip is able to perform parallel processing at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated "cluster" system or a network of PCs.
Dr Scarle said: “You don't quite get the full whammy of a cluster, but it’s close.
"Instead of pumping out stunning graphics, it's reworked; in the case of my research, rather than calculating the position of a structure and texture it's now working out the different chemical levels in a cell."
-Wes
