Running PA : Full HD with humongous planets. And related questions.

PA most certainly doesn't use 100% CPU, and I'm saying that as someone with duel core (two threads per core) i3 CPU at 2.3GHz.

The client maybe not, I mean, why should it, you are most likely already GPU limited either way.

But the server most certainly would if it could. And the simulation just creates such a specific work load which puts a core to true 100% load with a single thread per core.

Oh well yes, it probably would. Hopefully one day we'll get sim to be multi-threaded so we can 100% more than one core... Heck two cores might be enough to increase perf massively.

I want to be able to max a 32 core monster server.... but we all have dreams

Is there any software that people can even buy that can run with 32 cores?

No. That would be near impossible to optimize.

Optimize? Anything running on 32 cores would probably need no optimization! XD

Im not sure you quite understand the problem here.

No I do, if he means that it's near impossible to optimize something to run on 32 cores then yeah I agree, but the way he said it made it sound like he said that'd it'd be difficult to make optimizations after the game runs on 32 cores.

Actually, there is quite a lot of software which scales up to these numbers (and even more). E.g. database servers, raytracers, solvers for huge linear and differential equation systems, video editing and encoding, physic simulations, and so much more.

And optimizing software for that number of threads isn't as difficult as it may sound at first either. Lots of work, sure, but by no means impossible.

Might want to take a gander at the Top 500 List.

None of those are commercial, and they all seem to be government weather computers.

Super computers don't use "software" per se. They are really meant for complex mathematical calculations and their "programs" are only built to take advantage of thousands of parallel cores. They are accelerators, not workstations.

Almost any modern video game can use literally thousands of GPU cores.

If you're being specific to CPU cores, then yes as well, even everyday programs like Chrome can use 32 cores if you have enough tabs open I think.

What is the maximum in game radius of planets currently?

The point being that parallel code has been written for a long, long time and if algorithms scale to millions of cores then having software that scales to 32 is pedestrian. But if you want something that scales to 32 cores that I use all the time that runs on Windows then Sony Vegas Pro would be one example.

And of course supercomputers run software. The benchmark used in the link is Fortran code. You can grab the source and run it on your PC if you wish. There are packages already made etc.

1300 I believe

Cubase with lots of plugins can utilise all 12 threads of my cpu..Hell even Pa can use 8 threads when running a server as well as a client. Admittedly not many will be using more than 5%.

Currently your best bet for pa would be a pre overclocked bundle deal with core i5 or i7 if you want to run big planet servers, with as much ram as you can afford. 8gb should be considered min.

I tried to run a server with 7 1300r planets just to see how far I could push it. Took 2mins before my ram was all used (32gb) and at that point the whole thing crashed.

The thing with Pa is there are no limits on how many units you can build. So it don't matter how powerful your computer is, at some point (if you keep building units) it will run out of resources and slow down.

hope that helps.