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What’s a supercomputer? It’s one of the biggest, fastest computers around, typically more than a hundred times as big and as fast as the PC on your desktop.
Since computers are constantly getting bigger (in memory and disk capacity) and faster, today’s PCs would have been supercomputers a decade ago. In fact, according to the list of the world’s Top 500 fastest supercomputers (www.top500.org), today’s fastest PC, with dual 3.2 GHz Pentium4 CPUs, would have ranked among the top 25 supercomputers in the world just 10 years ago — and would probably have outstripped the world’s fastest supercomputer 15 years ago.
What do people use supercomputers for? Mostly for science and engineering research. There are three major categories of supercomputing applications: simulation, data mining and visualization.
Simulation requires expressing the laws that govern physical phenomena as mathematical equations, then plugging in numbers and watching how things evolve. Examples include weather forecasting, galaxy formation and protein folding.
Data mining means finding needles of information in a haystack of data, the way that advertising companies do when they search their databases for people who might want to buy their products. Supercomputing examples include genomics (comparing strips of genetic data to find out how closely related you are to your next door neighbor, a mouse, or a housefly); signal processing, like trying to find your modem data in a noisy a phone line; and detecting storms that might produce tornados in a mountain of radar data.
Visualization means turning vast oceans of data into pictures and movies that we can understand intuitively. One of the most famous examples is in the movie “The Perfect Storm,” the shot showing the boat about to be swamped by a gigantic wave. That shot was made by simulating the laws of physics that govern ocean waves, then turning the data from that simulation into animation.
Supercomputing may sound complicated, but the basic principles behind it are fairly straightforward. At the University of Oklahoma, the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (www.oscer.ou.edu) has been teaching a series of workshops titled “Supercomputing in Plain English” (www.oscer.ou.edu/education.html), targeted at students, faculty and staff with strong backgrounds in science and math but limited programming experience. The goal of the workshops is to introduce people to the basic ideas behind supercomputing, after which we work one-on-one with them to figure out how to apply supercomputing to their personal science or engineering research projects.
Supercomputing is leading us to amazing discoveries and advances in everything from astronomy to zoology. Not only that, it’s also giving us a peek into the future, because what happens in supercomputing today will be on our desktops in 10 to 15 years. It’s an exciting way for today’s students to get a leg up on the marketplace, by being at the front of the technology curve.