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Supercomputing, There's an App For That
aarondubrow writes "Researchers at MIT have created an experimental system for smart phones that allows engineers to leverage the power of supercomputers for instant computation and analysis. The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small "reduced model" which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone. They were then able to solve engineering and fluid flow problems on the phone and visualize the results interactively. The project proved the potential for reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations for complicated problems on handheld devices."
Approximating supercomputing is not itself supercomping, fellas.
Congrats on making /., however.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The money quote "This is not the first time that model reduction algorithms have been used to ameliorate the complexities of large-scale physical simulations. The advantage of the system designed by Knezevic and his colleagues is its rigorous error bounds, which tell a user the range of possible solutions, and provide a metric of whether an answer is accurate or not. The error bounds are based on mathematical theory developed in Prof. Patera's research group at MIT over a number of years. "
The research is about error bounds on coarse grained models. The smart phone is just hype.
46 & 2
The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small "reduced model" which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone
This is like saying that watching Toy Story on your iPhone leveraged the massive renderfarm used by Pixar.
I'm surprised they didn't use Windows Mobile for this :-)
So... if you analyze a problem and discover you can get mostly accurate results from a simple algorithm, you don't need a supercomputer anymore? What a concept! I'm going to go write the first physics simulator for personal computers!
Seriously, the cool bit is that they're generating these reduced models programatically. But the way it reads, it sounds like the reduced model itself, and the fact that it runs on smart phones are the important parts.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Is that a supercomputer in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
...but I'm going to go ahead and argue that they are not "performing supercomputing on a phone", because that kind of marketing doesn't belong in research.
Yes, it could be very useful; I have no doubt it's just as useful as they claim. And yes, it allows someone in practice to solve a problem "in the field" with a phone, when otherwise a supercomputer might have to be used.
But the supercomputing was done on a supercomputer in advance, when the reduced model was calculated. Its just that instead of giving one specific answer for one specific input, the supercomputer is returning an algorithm that will approximate the answer within known error bounds for a specified domain of inputs. Executing the algorithm isn't supercomputing (if it were, you couldn't do it in a few seconds on a phone); it's using the fruits of the earlier supercomputing that produced the algorithm.
I'll sleep better at night knowing my pr0n is finally safe from my wife..
he's got the whole world in his hand ...
I would make the educated guess that it could easily work on other Android platforms, not just the Nexus One, depending on their implementation.
This is just marketing at work. from TFA: The real impact of the system may come in the application of these methods to aircraft or automobiles, which use control systems to react to inputs from the environment in order to achieve optimal safety and performance. Examples include traction control in cars and stabilization systems in jet fighters. “If you have sensors feeding in data to the reduced order model system, then it could solve the equation corresponding to the input data, and indicate the appropriate response in real-time based on the calculations you performed on a supercomputer,” This is how things work already: control systems on a jet fighters do not solve a CFD problem to know how to control the plane, they have a built in model (yeah, "reduced order", if you want to call it this way) that approximate the actual behavior of the plane. Doing it on a smartphone is useless. Furthermore the article has no details on how the error bounds are claculated.
oh, and first post!
Well, approximately.
which is totally what she said
I'll believe they've created mobile supercomputing when someone puts a powerful GPU that is CUDA-ready in a smartphone.
Of course, you better get some big batteries for your phone, because Teraflops ain't free
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
I had images in my brain of an article about getting torque and mpi (something that, to my knowledge, there's no reason outside practicality to stop from working) plus some sort of auto-meshing running on android phones or some such (though using wifi as an interconnect makes me shudder), *that* would be phone supercomputing, this is *not*.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
super computers, big whoop.
The phone isn't actually doing anything but functioning as a UI.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I've been using FEMM lately for some magnetics stuff I've been working on. I would LOVE an android port, or some way to run simulations from my phone.
I don't *really* need it, but its just funny how something like that is actually possible these days. We probably will have supercomputers in our hands someday. I mean, current phones already are supercomputers by the standards of what...? 30 years ago? 20 years ago?
Smartphones will become the tricorders of the future, its inevitable.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
I had a supercomputer performing simulations (ground water) and was able to visualise the results interactively on a mobile phone back in 2004.
Partial Writeup
Boy, you can use Python and solve for primes for days tapping a super with this device.
Great. Another way to kill my Nexus One's battery. There's a reason I always keep two fresh ones in my pocket (batteries, you perv).
Supercomputers are big. Even when idle they still require lots of power and cooling, so ideally you want your supercomputer to be 100% utilized all of the time. That's why most supercomputers are "over-subscribed" and have batch schedulers (moab/torque, PBS, LSF, etc.). Users submit jobs, and the scheduler goes about placing those jobs on the supercomputer in a way that keeps utilization as close to 100% as possible. This means that typically when you submit a job it will not run immediately.
If your cellphone "out in the field" is relying on a supercomputer to do calculations, you probably aren't going to want to sit there waiting the minutes/hours/days it might take for your job to make its way through the queue. So you have a few choices: Make some sort of system reservation and only use your phone during the reservation time (probably not practical when you are "out in the field"), configure your scheduler to pre-empt currently running jobs in favor of the "cell phone" jobs (this might piss off non-cellphone users), or dedicate some or all of the system to doing nothing but being available for cell phone jobs....and the portion you dedicate will have to be enough to cover all of your cell phone users.
The last option is probably the best in terms of making sure that there is always supercomputing resources available for the cell phone users, but this undersubscription will cause your supercomputer to sit idle when field work isn't being done. So suddenly you are paying to power and cool a supercomputer that is sitting there waiting on the user to do something.
Supercomputer companies are slowly working on making supercomputers "greener", i.e. requiring less power/cooling, the ability to power off cpus/nodes/frames when not in use, etc. But until this green technology is perfected paring supercomputers with cell phones seems like a very inefficient way to do things.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
oh, wait, it will probably be on (shudder) ATT. all 11,000 pounds of freon-cooled 3-phase phone.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Does it still hurt that the G1 moved more units in its first minute in the market than the Microsoft Kin did in whole lifespan? That would be nice if it bothered you. I subsist from your pain. I'm a pain vampire that way.
The Google phone is still available through other vendors though not from Google, but it did what it was intended to do: convince vendors that there was a market for the Android candybar phone. It's proved and there's no more need for the proof because the idea has taken off. Google doesn't have to sell that idea any more, and the G1 is still well supported. Now that Android is proven on the candybar, new models with more advanced processors are available that exploit the available app market for that form factor - a market that would not exist if Google had not broken the ice. Google told the market: if you won't make it, we will! And it was popular so the market made it and now they don't need to beat them to death about how it was a good idea. They hoped also to prove the direct market for phones to defeat the subsidized model and that didn't work out so they failed there - but WE still won.
Google isn't and doesn't want to be a phone vendor. Their interest is ensuring that if people search they use Google search. Their interest is in maximizing your bandwidth so you can search more times per day. They would prefer it if your mobile phone defaulted to Google search, because mobile clients yield more cents per ad exposure than desktop clients. But as a fallback position if your browser can render their simple home page and you can set it as your home page they're ok with that because you chose it. That's their whole business model in a nutshell.
Google isn't and doesn't want to be a wired internet provider. But if you had gigabit broadband you would see their ads more, so faster internet benefits them in a way that doesn't hurt them. They're working their gigabit broadband initiative. Same with wireless spectrum, or any of the many other things they do. Sometimes they buy us freedom (with broadband spectrum for example) without committing a cost to themselves or spending any money. Some of this is quite awesome - the sale of spectrum used to be a quiet thing but now that Google's engaged we're aware of how our government is doling out our communal spectrum property, and how we suffer when it's sold to the wrong people.
I'm not saying that Google is angelic here, except in comparison to the incumbent providers of bandwidth. It goes to motivation: Comcast (or whatever provider) is motivated to deliver the least bandwidth for the dollars paid because to Comcast bandwidth costs money and the money you pay is where Comcast's money comes from. Google is motivated to deliver the most bandwidth per dollar paid because to Google more bandwidth equals more ads per minute, because people who hope to sell you stuff is where Google's money comes from. To truly understand this difference you have to understand that you personally are the object that is bought and sold here. Your interests, your motivations, your desires, and most especially your disposable income are the object of this engineering. Properly speaking you should be in favor of the Internet building a path you your wallet unless it's done in a way that's dishonest or unfair. It allows you to buy any object for sale anywhere, when once you had to go to South Africa to buy tribal masks as a travelling trophy. For me personally there are some aspects that make me uncomfortable enough that I look carefully at the terms of the deal.
As a subscriber you can choose to subscribe with a vendor whose interests are apposite of yours, or one whose interests are aligned. It's your choice, and Google doesn't want to limit your choice here but you can be sure Comcast does. Comcast has an established market to protect, much like MaBell did back when we still had landlines (remember those?)
Ultimately people will choose and I respect that. The purpose of my post isn't to run down those who've c
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've been waiting over a decade for Java's features to support mobile objects to have an infrastructure that made deploying them worthwhile. Why send the logic around the network, instead of just sending the data to where the processors are? Well, with the vast majority of computing power now distributed among so many users, and mostly idling across the year, it's worth using distributed supercomputing now. Folding@Home was a good start, but the distributed app should be generic enough that any crunching can exploit whatever processing it can get access to.
Now we need a marketplace that can aggregate all that processing to consumers of it, and compensate the people who let the mobile objects run on their devices. The natural operators of that system would be the telcos. But since they never do anything new, they'll be too late to the game to be the ones who do it. So who will?
If I were Larry Ellison, I'd have Oracle do it. And sell more Oracle machines to run the Java infrastructure.
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make install -not war
It's funny how a phone which didn't sell well seems to keep showing up in press releases
The Iphone?
(Apple have about 3% of the market, yet get a mention several times a day in any random Slashdot story; to put things in perspective, Nokia ship twice as many phones per quarter than Apple have ever sold, and even just one of their many products, the 5800, has sold equal to or more than the original "iPhone". Android has now already overtaken Apple btw, and is the fastest growing platform, whilst Apple are actually now increasing sales slower than Symbian, Android and RIM, according to Q2 2010 results.)
good point and valid too. But to be fair, the press doesn't write many stories about nuts, bolts and screws( sold in the billions of units ) but they'll write about nice shiny new cars made up of nuts, bolts, and screws. The point is, utility devices are boring to the press but put something shiny in front of them and they'll gobble it up. Not to mention that most in the media segment are of the artsy-fartsy type and therefore are more likely to side with Apple. Remember, Apple users were constantly fighting just to keep their platform of choice as big businesses constantly tried to consolidate on only Microsoft products. I see so much press coverage as some what of a 'fighting back' consequence of so many years of oppression.
/. would have got that.
As for Android, it's cool and cheap and every where so it's finding press coverage also.
And BTW, my original post was a jab at the press for putting down the Nexus One. I should have been more obvious but I thought more on
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
why didn't they simply created installed an apache server and access the result trough http using the web browser of any phone not just an android
http://agender.sourceforge.net/ get a free schedule tool