Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercomputer for a week?

4 points·kahseng··10 comments

Say one day you are told that you can get a whole week's access to a cheap supercomputer (think: 64-cores, 512GB RAM, 4TB space...not cloud computing) for FREE. Before that, you can do all your planning, designing, write code, etc. What would you do?

(for your startup, for mankind, for fun, etc...)

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Assuming I have protein strains data for Alzheimer’s patients along with their ancestors data and assuming I know the protein which if in excess causes this disease, I can attempt to find out what can be a possible cause of this disease. Supercomputer will be really helpful to these kind of pattern matching searches and run protein visualization tools.

I would secure access for longer than a week:

./john /etc/shadow

Only today I heard a story from a friend about a lab assistant he worked with that did just that in the early nineties. The only mistake he made was calling the executable "password-cracker".

Or, say in 1988 you were told you could have a 2008 PC for a week... That's a bigger jump in power for most people than what you're suggesting.

Indeed, but I'm being realistic here. This isn't just a hypothetical "wouldn't it be nice if...".

Heck, I've had access to a supercomputer for years and I still don't know what to do with it "to help mankind".

Run my map-reduce as a single task. :)

I did think of that, but I realized that there wasn't too much additional value because map-reduce can be run cheaply enough on Hadoop clusters via EC2. I wonder if there are other ideas that this would open up.

Rent it out to other programmers ;)

de-pixelate censored images?

...what, no?

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