A Means to an End

At the National Science Foundation symposium on “Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation,” participants are talking less about the speed of new supercomputers and showing more interest in improving algorithms those computers can use to solve the world’s ills. The event is being held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y.

Clas A. Jacobson, chief scientist of controls at United Technologies Corporation, a technology company, said Thursday that even with the growth of computing power recently, computers can only tackle so much information at one time. Plus, he said, supercomputers are not available to everyone who needs them.

That leads to researchers taking short cuts, perhaps by focusing on small samples of data instead of looking at the big picture. For combing through data on, say, human behavior on a wide scale, supercomputers could come up short, as they would eventually become overwhelmed with information.

“Computing is a means to an end,” Mr. Jacobson said. “It’s not the answer by itself.”

Michael J. Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at the National Science Foundation, said more scientists needed to think like a computer would when approaching problems. If they can develop better methods for computers to solve problems, that will be far more beneficial than building faster and faster supercomputers.

That doesn’t mean superfast computers aren’t important. Rensselaer held a ribbon-cutting ceremony today for its new supercomputer, which officials say is the seventh fastest in the world and the fastest of any supercomputer on a college campus. It’s able to perform 100 trillion calculations per second.

The $100-million supercomputer center, called the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, was created through a collaboration between the university, IBM, and New York State. —Dan Carnevale