University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

Transcription

A supercomputer these days is very easy to understand. You take your laptop. You imagine you have 10,000 of them. Put all 10,000 of them in a couple of refrigerator-size cabinets. Connect them all through thousands and thousands of meters of optical fiber. And that's a supercomputer. The mission of the institute is to provide advanced computational resources to enable the research of many groups on campus that rely on those supercomputers for their daily research. Twenty years ago you would walk into a lab and a computer was a rarity. But now computers are everywhere and more and more researchers are finding out naturally that just your desktop and laptop is not enough. It's not enough because your microscope now is higher resolution. Because when you do an NMR it's not a small image, it's a huge image. When you sequence somebody's genome, you don't produce a small snippet of sequence. Now you can sequence entire genomes in a small amount of time. So the amount of information that's being produced in a variety of disciplines is bigger, and this information can only be analyzed and understood if you have the computational capabilities to do it. Things are getting interesting and more complicated because, as you know, when you buy a laptop these days, they'll sell you an i7, and an i5, and a 3 core, and a 4 core, and a 3 core and 1/2, and a dancing partner. So soon we will have processors that will have 400 of those computers inside the chip. So the supercomputers of tomorrow are not very huge machines. They are not very strange looking. Just think of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions in a few years of computers all put together in an enclosure which is no larger than a couple of refrigerators, and making those work on the same particular task.