For decades, supercomputers have been the tightly guarded property of universities and governments. But what would happen if regular folks could get their hands on one?
The price of supercomputers is dropping quickly, in part because they are often built with the same off-the-shelf parts found in personal computers, as a supercomputing conference [held] last week made clear. Just about any organization with a few million dollars can now buy or assemble a top-flight machine.
Meanwhile, research groups and companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Intel are finding ways to make vast stores of information available online through cloud computing.
These advances are pulling down the high walls around computing-intensive research. A result could be a democratization that gives ordinary people with a novel idea a chance to explore their curiosity with heavy computing firepower — and maybe find something unexpected.
The trend has driven some of the top computing experts and scientists in the world to work toward freeing valuable stores of information. The goal is to fill big computers with scientific data and then let anyone in the world with a PC, including amateur scientists, tap into these systems.
“It’s a good call to arms,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, chief executive of Silicon Graphics, which sells computing systems to labs and businesses. “The technology is there. The need is there. This could exponentially increase the amount of science done across the globe.”
The notion of sharing information among leading research centers is hardly new. Some of the earliest incarnations of what we now know as the World Wide Web came to life so that physicists and other scientists could have access to large data stores from afar.
The current thinking, however, is that the labs can accomplish far more than was previously practical by piggybacking on some of the trends sweeping the technology industry. And,…