Hacker News Reader

Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

This is petty, but should I believe the Wikipedia article when it says "the barriers are controlled by a supercomputer"?

Unless this is a 1980s-vintage supercomputer, I'm baffled. The barriers' main function is to open or close. Someone needs to assess and predict rising water levels, but a lot of that is surely done by other systems. Add in some speed adjustments and some docking/aligning adjustments to get everything to shut just so -- and it still sounds far simpler than an iPhone camera.

The civil engineering challenge is huge. But I'm not seeing a huge need for the very high end of modern computing power to make it all work.

View on HN

The citation to the previous sentence (see https://www.dekennisvannu.nl/site/artikel/Rekenkracht-is-mac...) discusses the use of supercomputers, but from Google's Dutch to English translation it's not clear if supercomputer is in contradistinction to the BOS system that controls the barrier, or if BOS was just a lesser type of supercomputer-class controller.

Here's more information on BOS: https://park.org/Netherlands/pavilions/techno/svk/engels/wer... https://park.org/Netherlands/pavilions/techno/svk/engels/wer...

Here's a page describing BOS from the company that built it, though emphasizing it's reliability, not computational power: https://www.cgi-group.co.uk/en/media/case-study/intelligent-...

Maybe it uses a supercomputer to simulate the incoming tide and decide how much water to let in before raising the gate? It seems odd that they'd need more computation power than a tide table and an associated lookup table of setpoints, though.

The thing is made to stop storm surges, not simply the regular tide. Presumably the "super computer" refer to computers predicting the weather, which even these days is a pretty processor intensive thing to do.

Yeah, they might need a feed from the local weather bureau as well. It seems odd to describe that as "powered by a supercomputer", though - unless you'd also say I "used a supercomputer" to decide whether to take the car or the bike on any given day.

From the article: ”Part of the Delta Works, the barriers are controlled by a supercomputer, and automatically close when Rotterdam (especially the Port of Rotterdam) is threatened by floods.”

It’s not the mechanical controller, it’s the decision to pre-activate protection based on prediction (“threat”) of weather conditions and water levels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com