WHY WE NEED EVER-INCREASING PERFORMANCE
The vast increases in computational power that
we’ve been enjoying for decades now have been at the heart of many of the most
dramatic advances in fields as diverse as science, the Internet, and
entertainment. For example, decoding the human genome, ever more accurate
medical imaging, astonishingly fast and accurate Web searches, and ever more
realistic computer games would all have been impossi-ble without these
increases. Indeed, more recent increases in computational power would have been
difficult, if not impossible, without earlier increases. But we can never rest
on our laurels. As our computational power increases, the number of prob-lems
that we can seriously consider solving also increases. The following are a few
.examples:
. Climate modeling. In order to better understand climate change, we need far more accurate computer models, models that include interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, solid land, and the ice caps at the poles. We also need to be able to make detailed studies of how various interventions might affect the global climate.
Protein folding. It’s believed that misfolded proteins may be
involved in dis-eases such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, but
our ability to study configurations of complex molecules such as proteins is
severely limited by our
current computational power.
Drug discovery. There are many ways in which increased computational power can be used in research into new medical treatments. For example, there are many drugs that are effective in treating a relatively small fraction of those suffering from some disease. It’s possible that we can devise alternative treatments by care-ful analysis of the genomes of the individuals for whom the known treatment is ineffective. This, however, will involve extensive computational analysis of
genomes.
Energy research. Increased computational power will make it
possible to program
much more detailed models of technologies such
as wind turbines, solar cells, and batteries. These programs may provide the
information needed to construct far
more efficient clean energy sources.
Data analysis. We generate tremendous amounts of data. By
some estimates, the quantity of data stored worldwide doubles every two years [28], but
the vast majority of it is largely useless unless it’s analyzed. As an example,
knowing the sequence of nucleotides in human DNA is, by itself, of little use.
Understand-ing how this sequence affects development and how it can cause
disease requires extensive analysis. In addition to genomics, vast quantities
of data are generated by particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN, medical imaging, astronomical research, and Web search engines—to name
a few.
These and a host of other problems won’t be solved
without vast increases in computational power.
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