Supercomputing in Wired

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Wired’s Gadget Lab ran a story last week on the impact of personal supercomputing on individual scientists

About a year ago John Stone, a senior research programmer at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues found a way to bypass the long waits for computer time at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

…“Now instead of taking a couple of days and waiting in a queue, we can do the calculations locally,” says Stone. “We can do more and better science.”

The emphasis in this story is on NVIDIA’s own brand of GPU-based personal supercomputing, though of course there are other options. And personal these days can mean anything from a desktop with a couple Tesla cards to a deskside CX-1 from Cray.

And here is the most important reason why personal supercomputing of all stripes matters to the world at large

It also means that research projects that typically would have never get off the ground because they are deemed too costly and too resource and time intensive now get the green light. “The cost of making a mistake is much lower and a lot less intimidating,” says Stone.