Superstorm Predictions and Disease Diagnosis…from Your Mobile Device?
While no one could have predicted the extent of the damage that Hurricane Sandy would do to the northeastern US, the ability to predict the storms as a whole is being made easier with the immense computational power of supercomputers.
Yellowstone is “the world’s fastest supercomputer devoted to climate research” and is housed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Business Insider recently took a look into just how Yellowstone works, and the machine’s work ethic is impressive to say the least. After analyzing a half century’s worth of data from NASA and NOAA:
The model then moves that snapshot forward in time using mathematical equations describing how things like air and moisture move around in Earth's system, provided by the researchers. The computer breaks the problem up into little pieces and runs them across thousands of processors. In that process, the computer determines how those equations will change the initial conditions over time.
The race to build the world’s most powerful supercomputers is spanning the globe, as some are referring to it as the new space race. Year after year, former champions of processing power and speed are falling by the wayside as new, massive machines are built in the US, China, Europe, and Japan.
Supercomputers have typically required vast amounts of space, taking up enormous data centers, but Intel is trying to change that. Wired recently reported that:
Big-time data-center operations want the ultra-low-power profiles of the hardware in our cellphones, and the mobile world is hungry for the computational punch you get from much larger systems.
As users demand more from their mobile devices and the environment demands more from sprawling data centers, it only makes sense that these two technologies move toward each other.
While our dependency on lightning-fast computing power increases, some are hesitant to give technology all the credit when it comes to advancements and computational abilities. Joe McKendrick of SmartPlanet noted just last week that without the power of human interaction these amazing machines of any and all sizes idly stand by.
Shyam Sankar, director at Palantir Technologies, wonderfully sums up this concept by reminding us that “AI may extend computational power, but it’s meaningless without human interaction.”
While our phones and our supercomputers make giant strides toward the future, it’s important to understand that their computations were made possible not just for us, but by us. It’s the way we share that data with others that will determine just how far that technology ultimately evolves.
