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."

Re:appx.

[flaming error]

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.

Not even...

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:Not even...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a university PR piece, and these are notorious for being vague about what they are actually claiming .

It sounds like the supercomputer is basically doing all the grunt work and the phone is doing something analogous to interpolating the results. For example if the supercomputer supplies pre-computed results for some question for parameter alpha=1.0 and alpha=2.0 and if the user selects alpha=1.5 then the phone will interpolate the two supplied results and get an answer that will (if the interpolation method is a suitable choice) be a very accurate approximation to the full calculation for alpha=1.5.

It's more than just rending, but perhaps not that much more.

Put CUDA on a phone, then we can talk

[jpapon]

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

Re:PR Bullshit

[blair1q]

Everyone is spamming slashdot, and the people voting on the firehose are generally too lame to understand it. Throw "reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations" at them and they click the + just to look smart.

FEMM for android.

[Facegarden]

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

Re:Seems inefficient

[Bill Barth]

You don't understand how this works. You do the computation ahead of time on the supercomputer to build your reduced order model which you download onto your phone and take out into the field. Once you've downloaded the model, you don't need the supercomputer any more. You can use the phone to do computations using the reduced model as much as you like. If you get into a regime where the predicted error from the reduced order model is too high, you can go back to the supercomputer and update the model. If that happens, then you'll probably have to wait in queue again, but that's not such a big deal.