Handheld Supercomputers in 10-15 Years?

An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away, according to Professor Michael Zaiser, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. Zaiser has been researching how tiny nanowires — 1000 times thinner than a human hair — behave when manipulated. Apparently such minuscule wires behave differently under pressure, so it has up until now been impossible to arrange them in tiny microprocessors in a production environment. Zaiser says he's figured out how to make them behave uniformly. These "tamed" nanowires could go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, mobile phones or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be. "If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years... The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close — 10 years, maybe 15," Zaiser said."

Comments

Re:Why supercomputers?

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point, Supercomputers are not called "Supercomputers" because they are simply faster than other machines. Supercomputers are large-scale vector machines designed for number-crunching capacity. They're great at scientific modeling and simulation, but aren't exactly something all that useful to the average person. (Unless you somehow think that the Cell in the PS3 was the smartest idea ever.)

Also, like most things in computing, "Supercomputer" is a moving target. Today's supercomputers tend to be large clusters of inexpensive machines running OSes like Linux, Mac OS X, or Solaris. (Windows supercomputing clusters probably exist as well, but I doubt that many organizations are willing to pay the software licensing fees.) So unless we can have a 500 processor distributed computing cluster in a Palmtop in 10 to 15 years, I seriously doubt we'll have "a handheld supercomputer". And if you want to go by the supercomputers of yesteryear, technically we already have that power in our handhelds. e.g. An iPhone's SIMD-equipped 625 MHz ARM processor could probably hold its own in vector calcs against some of the earlier supercomputer installations.

Sooo.... I call sensationalist headlines. Do I win a prize?

Re:Why supercomputers?

[stonecypher]

the first TeraFlop computer didn't appear until 1997. Does that mean that there were no supercomputers before this date?

You are correct. On checking, the number is gigaflop, not teraflop. My mistake: I misremembered on which line the term hinged. The first supercomputer appeared in 1961 - the IBM Stretch. But, in response to the intent of the question, yes, there is a specific date on which we crossed the supercomputing barrier.

Re:Yes, it will run linux

[pclminion]

Throwing things on the floor go much faster than 9.8 m/s^2.

No it doesn't, at least once the object leaves your hand. Then it's back under the influence of good old gravity, at 9.8 m/s^2, regardless of how fast you may have thrown it.