The pitter patter of tiny feet

And overwhelmed PC fans. That mechanical grinding noise pitches itself into your brain, slowly but surely mining away at your will to continue. You lurk around a corner... blackness. Nothing but the incessant grind, grind, grind of plastic on plastic. Sputter sputter, crunk... kaboom. That's vaguely the sound a computer makes when one tries to run a memory intensive EM simulation on it. Or more correctly when I run one. That's right, trying to simulate a particle beam (represented by the awesomeness of a wire carrying an electrical pulse. Oh yeah!) running through a small aperture in a ferrite magnet is capable of bringing 8GB of RAM-my goodness to its knees.

And thus rears the ugly head of doing science computationally. Sometime, somewhere you will want to simulate something. Nay, need to simulate something big. And as big and as fast as your machine might be, you'll run out of RAM. For those lucky enough to be able to push data to the Grid this isn't normally an issue. But for us poor plebs that can't use parralelised code the RAM hungry monster rears its head with astounding frequency. Take my present machine for instance. Core 2 Duo. 8GB RAM... by any sensible standards this should own anything that's thrown at it. But this is CERN. We do not do sensible. So... give said beasty 7 million mesh cells and tell it to carry out a FEM EM algorithm. And then watch it cry. Current usage... 2.5GB of RAM. And this is with a simple conductor. Lob in some lossy materials and watch it implode.

The solution? You get a supercomputer or big arse cluster. I live for the day.