The Need for Speed

What are the real advantages of making computers ever faster? Why, after all, can’t we use a machine that takes a month or a week to complete a task instead of a day or an hour? For many problems, we can. But the truth is, we’re just beginning to gain the computing power to understand what is going on in systems with thousands or millions of variables; even the fastest machines are just now revealing the promise of what’s to come.

Or take the difficulties we’ve encountered trying to understand and harness nuclear fusion-that perpetually just-out-of-reach panacea for our energy problems. “It can take a decade to perform a single [fusion] experiment,” says Thomas Sterling, faculty associate at the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech. “Faster computers would accelerate these projects by decades, allowing us not only to design safe reactors that give us the power to run the planet, but also to know how to get rid of the waste.”

One recent example of both the promise and the limitations of today’s most powerful computers came from IBM’s ASCI White machine, the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, which IBM researchers used to investigate how materials crack and deform under stress. The study, announced last spring, simulated the behavior of a billion copper atoms. A billion certainly sounds like a lot of variables-until you realize that it would take more than a hundred trillion times that number of atoms to make up even a cubic centimeter of copper.

“There’s a notion out there that high-performance computing is a mature industry, where all the problems have been solved, and we’ve moved on,” says Burton Smith, chief scientist at Cray, a pioneering supercomputer company in Seattle. “That is false. The embarrassment of the Earth Simulator reveals the fact that there is still plenty more understanding to be had.”