Using Math To Design Cities And Supercomputers

caek writes "If you've played Sim City you've wrestled with one of the problems faced by supercomputer designers. Unfortunately there's no GameFAQs.com for the technical staff at Japan's Earth Simulator or Srinidhi Varadarajan and colleagues at Virginia Tech. True enough, they won't have to deal with rising crime or Godzilla but, as hinted at in a recent paper in Journal of Physics A, the physical layout of a massively parallel supercomputer is fundamentally the same problem as minimizing the time commuters spent stuck in traffic jams. Read the rest of my kuro5hin article for a popular explanation."

Comments

Chicken-and-egg problem! ;-)

[PaulBu]

At the time when I was involved with preliminary design of HTMT petaflops supercomputer (yes, it is petaflops, as in million gigaflops, see, for example, here), anyway, one of the problems which would require a supercomputer with this this kind of performance was real-time optimization of car traffic in a city the size of Manhattan, NY.

Paul B.

No computer design required, just brains.

[Chemisor]

Look at this city design. Instead of trying to create better routing of commuters, it eliminates the whole problem of commuting.

Re:We need to fix the ones we have somehow.

[AmericanInKiev]

I don't know about a totally car free zone, trucks still need to be able to make deliveries for instance.

In Europe - Northern Germany (Oldenburg) to be exact - there are walking areas, and these rather samll delivery trucks come early in the morning.

I'm not sure if there's a sticker - a time - or a general understanding - but I didn't see unnecessary vehicles - and it is clear that thetruck are on pedestrian turf - not the ither way around - which drastically changes the way they are driven

AIK