IDG Contributor Network: Can Alan Alda and President Obama make supercomputing cool again?
Heading into next week’s Supercomputing 2015 conference in Austin, the topic on the tip of every attendee’s tongue is simply, "supercomputing." Researchers, industry leaders and computational users are gathering by the thousands to investigate how many ways can we explore the power of the microchip in a supercomputing environment.
And it can’t happen at a better time. What once was an American stranglehold -- the illustrious title of the country owning the most powerful supercomputer -- has slowly slipped from our grasp following the crash of the Cold War.
Maybe, as Americans, we devalued the supercomputer’s place in the race to capitalize on the PC, and subsequently lost our focus? Some examples of the most famous supercomputers in the American experience -- WOPR and Watson -- have no commercial, government, military or research value. Watson is merely an advertisement for IBM and best known for its Jeopardy appearances, while WOPR was a character in the 1980’s popular Cold War flick, War Games.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here