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Supercomputing, There's an App For That

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-palm-over-your-hand dept.

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."

8 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:appx. by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It sounds like the supercomputer generated an algorithm for the smartphone to run. I guess they can call that "leveraging the power of a supercomputer" but implying the phone app is doing supercomputing stretches things a bit far. I call misleading headline.

  2. PR Bullshit by pigwiggle · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    46 & 2
    1. Re:PR Bullshit by oldhack · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why are they spamming slashdot anyways? Has the academia gotten so pathetic that they deem any exposure is a good exposure?

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      Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
    2. Re:PR Bullshit by WankersRevenge · · Score: 3, Funny

      I didn't realize you could run algorithms on a smart phone ... these guys are brilliant! ;)

    3. Re:PR Bullshit by blair1q · · Score: 5, Funny

      Go into settings and select "scientific mode". That makes a lot more buttons appear.

  3. Not even... by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Not even... by Ambitwistor · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not really. In this case, the smart phone isn't simply rendering output of a supercomputer simulation.

    2. Re:Not even... by Ambitwistor · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.