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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. 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.

  2. 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!"