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?
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I see little or no mention of the industrial business uses for this type of computing. Oil and gas geological research. Stock futures forecast modeling. Air and water fluid dynamics modeling for aerospace engineering and contract military work.
You would be surprised how much computational power “simple models” need, and its more like those tasks could always do with a bit more computer time, without a fixed amount “computer hours” required.
Also academics write bad code.
Oil companies use them to model stuff, others use them to do complex mathematics, etc. Basically any computationally-intensive job benefits from the power of a supercomputer.
Interestingly, GPUs are used in many of these situations nowadays – a serious reduction in cost!
My company buys supercomputer time to run complex weather models. We turn out 2 per day. It takes 2 hours for each model run, and that’s with more than 4000 cores dedicated to the computations. It’s worth it because we can provide very accurate weather information (over the next 48 hours) to paying customers.
Take a deck of 52 playing cards. The number of possibilities of the order of the cards in that deck when properly shuffled is 52 factorial (written as “52!”), which is 52 × 51 × 50 × 49 × 48 … × 2 × 1.
The product is a 68-digit number. How large is that? I defer to data scientist Scott Czepiel:
>How large, really, is 52 Factorial?
>This number is beyond astronomically large. So, just how large is it? Let’s try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise.
>Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We’re going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
>Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You’re going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years.
>After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean.
>Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe.
>Continue until the ocean is empty.
>Once it’s empty, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground.
>Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
>Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun.
>(Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go.)
>So, repeat the entire process. One step every billion years, one water drop every time around, one sheet of paper every ocean. Build a second stack to the Sun.
>Now build 1000 more stacks.
>Good news! You’re just about a third of the way done!
>To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand.
>Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket.
>If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon.
>Keep dealing, and when you’ve filled up the entire canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest.
>Empty out the sand and start over again. Play some poker, buy lotto tickets, ,drop grains of sand, and chisel some rock. When you’ve removed all 357 trillion pounds of Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining.
>Do that whole mountain levelling thing 255 more times. You would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds.
>The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt.
>But, let’s be realistic here. In truth you wouldn’t make it more than five steps around the earth before the Sun becomes a Red Giant and boils off the oceans. You’d still be shuffling while all the stars in the universe slowly flickered out into a vast cosmic nothingness.
That’s just a deck of playing cards. Now imagine trying to model the possibilities of Earth’s climate, for example.
They have a supercomputer at the university I went to and one of my astrophysics professors used time on it for a (partial) universe simulation
I used supercomputers to simulate the universe in ridiculously high detail where things get interesting and lower detail where not much is happening. You can actually run small simulations on your home computer. But you can’t get anywhere enough detail to match the phenomenon that we observe in local stars and distant galaxies. Something that would take months to run on my laptop can be done overnight on the right supercomputer. Give it a shot yourself if you’re up for it: https://enzo-project.org/
While I don’t know every use for them, one is modeling the galaxy and universe.
Keeping track of every particle in the model; speed, direction, mass, energy/temperature. Then making sure that particle properly interacts with every other particle that it is tracking. . .It starts to build up.
It’s no so much that it’s overly complex, there’s just an insane number of calculations that need to be made, to move the model forward any amount of time.
An example could be trying to find a new cure for some disease. This requires a lot of calculations as far as I understood.
How about that Sag A* data crunching?
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