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Using Math To Design Cities And Supercomputers

Posted by timothy on from the equals-building-equals-logic-gate dept.

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."

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Chicken-and-egg problem! ;-) by PaulBu · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. No computer design required, just brains. by Chemisor · · Score: 3, Informative

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