"Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed astronomical just two years ago, won't just allow faster computations. These computers will enable entirely new types of science that couldn't have been done before. This new generation of petascale machines will move scientific simulation beyond just supporting the two main branches of science, theory and experimentation, and into the foreground. Instead of just hypotheses being tested with experiments and observations, large-scale extrapolation and prediction of things we can't observe or that would be impractical for an experiment, will become central to many scientific endeavors.
'It's getting to the point where simulation is actually the third branch of science,' Seager said. 'We say that nature is always the arbiter of truth, but it turns out our ability to observe nature is fundamentally limited.'"