It was through a piece of pure Googlestance that I came across Hector the supercomputer. I have to confess that I was not really aware that supercomputers were still needed, except for large scale number crunching jobs such as weather forecasting – we hear so much about schemes which allow you to donate spare capacity on your home computer to various large scale projects as to believe that such behemoths are no longer required for mere academic research
Mind you, a sneaky bit of me thinks that if it takes over 1.3 billion grid points and 640 processors running for 5 days ‘to achieve flow development sufficient to obtain turbulence statistics & spectra within the turbulent patch’ then there must be a simpler way - we are not nearly as clever as we need to be.
Hector reminded me of his predecessor Atlas, the British supercomputer of the early 1960s. The one acquired by London University was regarded with some awe, but looking back at how the subject was covered in The Times, it is plain that the £2,000,000 cost placed a severe strain on the university’s finances & two-thirds of its time was made available for commercial projects to ease the burden.
Looking at what The Times was reporting of the dawn of the new computer age can be dispiriting. An article by Derek Whipp in October 1961 reports that “There has been scepticism. Men who for years have made decisions based on their experience sometimes doubt what the machine tells them because the results do not seem to stand the challenge of common sense.”
A high street chemist started a computerised stock control/reordering system. People who had hitherto relied on their own mental processes doubted the results, but a check proved that human methods had allowed for unnecessary contingencies.
Using a phone to link to a computer, printing by computer (a £28,650 research grant to London University to explore the options was announced in February 1964) – these belonged to a future fantasy.
And it was not really until after the mid-1980s, after the arrival of the desk top computer &, even more importantly, the visual display screen for output right now, right here, that computers began to be the familiar objects that they are today.
Mind you, a sneaky bit of me thinks that if it takes over 1.3 billion grid points and 640 processors running for 5 days ‘to achieve flow development sufficient to obtain turbulence statistics & spectra within the turbulent patch’ then there must be a simpler way - we are not nearly as clever as we need to be.
Hector reminded me of his predecessor Atlas, the British supercomputer of the early 1960s. The one acquired by London University was regarded with some awe, but looking back at how the subject was covered in The Times, it is plain that the £2,000,000 cost placed a severe strain on the university’s finances & two-thirds of its time was made available for commercial projects to ease the burden.
Looking at what The Times was reporting of the dawn of the new computer age can be dispiriting. An article by Derek Whipp in October 1961 reports that “There has been scepticism. Men who for years have made decisions based on their experience sometimes doubt what the machine tells them because the results do not seem to stand the challenge of common sense.”
A high street chemist started a computerised stock control/reordering system. People who had hitherto relied on their own mental processes doubted the results, but a check proved that human methods had allowed for unnecessary contingencies.
Using a phone to link to a computer, printing by computer (a £28,650 research grant to London University to explore the options was announced in February 1964) – these belonged to a future fantasy.
And it was not really until after the mid-1980s, after the arrival of the desk top computer &, even more importantly, the visual display screen for output right now, right here, that computers began to be the familiar objects that they are today.
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