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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."
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
Not really. In this case, the smart phone isn't simply rendering output of a supercomputer simulation.
I just re-read the article. What it sounds like they're doing is having the supercomputer craft a reduced order model which is optimized to a particular range of parameters. That suggests to me that they're constructing a perturbative model about some fixed solution that the supercomputer produces. Perturbative approximations are more accurate the closer they are to the "reference" solution. So the innovation appears to be: the user can specify what set of parameters they want to perturb about, and therefore construct a custom model which is optimized to perform well in the parameter range that user is interested in.