Planets at 60 frames per second Suppose it were real time Real-time simulation on an IBM SP2 Uses 4D noise Uses w coord to evolve geography

In another project at NYU, my graduate student Daniel Kristjansson has ported the planet to run in parallel on an SP2 that IBM graciously donated to our lab. When properly tuned, this setup allows us to see the planet in all its glory, fully rendered at 30 frames per second. In addition, I asked Daniel to work with my 4D implementation of noise, so that the terrain can be made to interactively evolve its geography (by moving the noise domain in the hypothetical "fourth" dimension), landmasses appearing and falling away as you watch. If you click on Daniel's page, you can see the results.