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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."

7 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Why not? by danratherfan · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just make the city a big parking lot. With roads that lead to nowhere?

  2. Excellent.. by Kiriwas · · Score: 4, Funny

    The most powerful SimCity bot ever created!! Oh, and I suppose it can be used for other stuff too.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:Chicken-and-egg problem! ;-) by AmericanInKiev · · 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

  4. 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.

  5. Re:The Important thing is Rail by rewt66 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I read somewhere an article where somebody from Chicago was giving advice to Seattle on their new transit system. The author said that the key to getting people out of their cars is rapid transit - defined as "faster than driving". Just having transit isn't enough. People will still take their cars because it's faster, which equates to more convenient. But if the transit is faster than driving, people are more inclined to take it.

    San Francisco added a nice touch to this with their BART system. In some places, they build the rapid transit right up the freeway median. When you're stuck in traffic on the freeway, and the train blows past you at 80 MPH, it tends to make you think, "I wish I was on that!"

  6. Re:We need to fix the ones we have somehow. by AmericanInKiev · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Thanks for your perspective.

    I think you may have glossed over a point.

    The City must establish LINEAR High speed transit corridors.

    Because only LINEAR transit routes can achieve - Rapid - as in faster than an SUV - transportation (After you figure in the cost of waiting around)

    Deliberate Haste doesn't mean kicking people out of their homes - it does mean allocating the region for change. - and insisting that any changes - result in higher density outcomes.

    Those neighbourhoods are nice precisly *because* they have no high desnsity housing.

    This is perception.
    When I was in Egypt I stayed in a resort - it was very high density - but also a very nice neighborhood. We had gardens, pools, beaches - well you get the idea.

    If cities would reward high density housing with resort grade amenities - they could reclaim their air.

    Sure - only one row of houses can really have a nice view - but the theory of shared resources says its better that MORE PEOPLE have this view than fewer.

    And housing does not HAVE TO completely ruin the natural beauty - there are aztec designs - and a variety of old world looks which have natural appeal.

    The most important task is to alter public opinion - that living near railroad tracks in tenement buildings is sexy.

    Making sexy trains, and sexy tenement grounds is the solution to clean air.

    AIK