Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercomputer for a week?

Posted by kahseng on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @01:43AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Say one day you are told that you can get a whole week's access to a cheap supercomputer (think: 64-cores, 512GB RAM, 4TB space...not cloud computing) for FREE. Before that, you can do all your planning, designing, write code, etc. What would you do?

(for your startup, for mankind, for fun, etc...)

( 10 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by vparihar on Wednesday October 15, 2008 @02:10AM (#333043)

Assuming I have protein strains data for Alzheimer’s patients along with their ancestors data and assuming I know the protein which if in excess causes this disease, I can attempt to find out what can be a possible cause of this disease. Supercomputer will be really helpful to these kind of pattern matching searches and run protein visualization tools.

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by qhoxie on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @01:52AM (#331984)

I would secure access for longer than a week:

./john /etc/shadow

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by richcollins on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @03:14AM (#332026)

Only today I heard a story from a friend about a lab assistant he worked with that did just that in the early nineties. The only mistake he made was calling the executable "password-cracker".

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by gaius on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @06:14AM (#332103)

Or, say in 1988 you were told you could have a 2008 PC for a week... That's a bigger jump in power for most people than what you're suggesting.

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by kahseng on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @11:01AM (#332254)

Indeed, but I'm being realistic here. This isn't just a hypothetical "wouldn't it be nice if...".

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by lacker on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @12:06PM (#332307)

Heck, I've had access to a supercomputer for years and I still don't know what to do with it "to help mankind".

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by umangjaipuria on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @05:49AM (#332090)

Run my map-reduce as a single task. :)

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by kahseng on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @11:05AM (#332257)

I did think of that, but I realized that there wasn't too much additional value because map-reduce can be run cheaply enough on Hadoop clusters via EC2. I wonder if there are other ideas that this would open up.

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by decadentcactus on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @08:27AM (#332161)

Rent it out to other programmers ;)

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercom... by ram1024 on Tuesday October 14, 2008 @01:56AM (#331987)

de-pixelate censored images?

...what, no?

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