Faster Computers Accelerate Pace of Discovery

Petascale computers also will make it possible to predict, say, the effect of an earthquake on every building in downtown Los Angeles, experts said. Current models cannot yield predictions for areas smaller than a square mile or two. The increased detail could help shape building codes and be a valuable tool in evacuation planning and disaster preparedness.

Computer simulations also help assess the reliability, safety, security and performance of weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile, years removed from any real-life nuclear tests. "Nuclear weapons are the quintessential example of something you can't really test anymore, so a lot of it has to be done computationally," said Hopson, the Los Alamos scientist.

Other potential uses of petascale computers include better simulations of what happens when stars explode into supernovas and die, and new and more refined analyses of experimental drugs and their effects on disease and interactions with other medications, experts said.

Still another is the modeling of the bird flu virus and how it might evolve to become more communicable and lethal -- knowledge that could help scientists develop a vaccine in time to use it and to inform public health planning. Petascale computers are also expected to lead to more potent models for Wall Street to calculate risk and predict the fate of financial instruments, as well as more advanced digital prototypes of automobiles and jet aircraft, further reducing the need for physical mock-ups.

The remarkable advances in computing power of recent decades are frequently attributed to the tenet known as Moore's Law, named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, which says that progress in building chips doubles the power of microprocessors about every 18 months. But that alone does not explain the leaps in supercomputing, scientists said.

Today's supercomputers rely not only on better "compute nodes" (made up of faster chips and more memory), but also on scientists' ability to "gang" hundreds of thousands of those nodes together in a single machine and to devise better ways of having them communicate with one another and divide up the work of complex problem solving.

"If you ran today's code on yesterday's computers, they would be much faster," said Raymond Bair, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. "People have figured out how to solve the problems faster."

Even before a petascale computer is a reality, scientists are anticipating the next big milestone, the exascale machine -- a thousand times more powerful still, and capable of 1 million trillion calculations per second. But they'll have to wait. That one isn't expected until about 2018.