The Computer That Will Change Everything – Chicago Magazine

chicagomag.com

6 pointsrbanffy3 comments

"Our ability to design reactors, our ability to come up with new batteries — all that is a result of computing.” You know, just the climate, the human genome, nuclear power, robots."

Have these been a direct result of the fastest supercomputers or have they been the result of general computer advancements?

It would be interesting to know whether the fastest supercomputers have truly revolutionized everything or if they simply serve as a source of pride for the countries that produce them. Also, advancements in software often lag behind advancements in hardware. So, is there a unique use for their speed beyond calculating PI to a new world record level of precision?

supercomputers are basically a completely different kind of computer to a desktop, or a server, or even a more conventional cluster of servers in a datacenter. What makes the biggest difference is the interconnectivity: supercomputers use very high bandwidth and low latency links like infiniband between the nodes. What this enables is distributed processing of tasks which are a lot less easily parallelised than the kind of thing you can do with a distributed system. For the most part this is things like simulations, where every part can depend on every other part from one iteration to the next, and you can basically always increase the resolution of these simulations to fill the compute available and get better results. Yes, with general computer advancements a regular workstation can now equal an older supercomputer, but it has to be few decades old supercomputer.

Seems like a whole of pork to me. Sorry for the Chicago joke. But definitely not even close to the boondoggle that ITER is.

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