Using Math To Design Cities And Supercomputers

Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 2, 2004 @03:29AM 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."

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Re:Chicken-and-egg problem! ;-) by AmericanInKiev · 2004-06-02 05:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

So the question then is - how do you layout a city such that 10 million computer experts can all get to one place and design a super computer capable of calculating the design of such a city.

Idea: remove the vehicle subsidy - which is killing trains, buses, and bicycles.

Then you get mass transit.

In the end - the real barrior to optimizing streets will be the arab oil cartells screaming about the loss of oil revenues to keep those compluters stuck in traffic burning up time, space, and O2.

AIK