What kind of humongous tasks do supercomputers do? What type of mathematical models can be so complex that it requires a computer close to $1B?
In: 244
A recent example of a problem that needs a supercomputer is wind turbines. Imagine you want to build offshore wind power, in water too deep to solidly anchor to the bottom – the entire turbine floats. How can you be sure your engineering design will withstand a category three hurricane? You can’t build a prototype and wait for a hurricane to destroy it, rebuild and try again, it would take forever and cost billions. You have to simulate it – which means you need to simulate materials stresses on a platform that is spinning in 100+mph winds, bobbing up and down and swaying in the waves. You need to model the wind turbulence, coupled to wave motion, coupled to moving blade surfaces, stress and strain forces from the microscale to many meters, all together at the same time, in timeframes from microseconds to hours. That’s a problem that can use as much compute power as you can throw at it, and more. And that’s just one problem – there are many others like it in scale and complexity.
Latest Answers