computingHow does High Performance Computing affect the economy, and why is there such a big drive (especially between the three countries China, Japan, and the USA) to create marginally faster supercomputers over each other year after year?
I use to work in HPC (on the research side). There are some key targeted fields that use HPC:
There is a lot of computing problems for which a supercomputer is making the difference. In the civil world, I guess the two most profitable use of a supercomputer are in oil and insurance.
By the way, supercomputers are not marginally faster each other year after year, they are for a few years, then there is a breakthrough, then again incremental improvements.
edit after comments:
@EnergyNumbers There are several economics model for HPC. The company that provides hardware for a supercomputer is pretty sure to have an increase in sells if the supercomputer is one of the most efficient. There are several criteria for ranking supercomputers : power of computation, but also “greenness”, that is power of computation related to power comsumption (half of it for computation, half of it for cooling). So if the best supercomputer has IBM chips with myricom network, it is likely that IBM and Myricom will sell a lot of stuff for a few months.
Also, the other economic model is to sell computation time on a large computer. What you buy in this case is the “peak” power of the machine. For instance, you may need a petaflop machine (10^15 flops of peak performance) but only for a few hours, so you rent it.This is the case in some applications (nuclear physics for instance), while in others (insurance) you need less peak computation power but for a very long time. In this second case, having a top notch supercomputer can be an attractor for companies that need it sometimes: the closest you are from the computer, the easiest it is to communicate quickly (if you have large amount of data).
@DarkTemplar Exascale computing is the next step in the “power scale”, it is 10^18 (trillion in US english I guess) floating point opération per second (flops) while the best supercomputer is currently 7*10^15 (petaflop) (K computer, designed with Fujitsu equipments). With an exascale computer, we will be able to model more complicated things (nuclear physics, cell behavior, etc.).
Big Data is the buzzword picturing the fact that we have more and more data about everything : all phone calls, all mails, all behaviors (CC TV), all books, the web, etc. Since we have good data mining methods, it may be possible to process all the data for doing various stuff (from marketing to surveillance) if we have enough computing power.
“Computing” affects the economy, improving its efficiency, by making it faster and easier to do the multitudinous calculations on which the economy depends.
Whether “supercomputing” is the “magic bullet” in computing is a tougher question to answer. It may be a useful productive “enhanced” form of computing. Or it may just be the focus of an “arms race” between the three superpowers, just as the space race was in the 1960s.
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