Android Phone Can Be Used as a Supercomputer
This supercomputer fits in your pocket.
When you hear 'supercomputer' and 'small' in the same sentence, you likely wonder how small a room are they talking about. However, when the folks at MIT and Texas Advanced Computing Center say small, they mean small as in pocket-sized.
A collaboration between MIT and the Texas Advanced Computing Center has led to an Android application that the two institutions claim can do honest-to-goodness supercomputing.
TACC explains that the team at MIT performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on TACC's Ranger supercomputer and then generated a smaller, reduced model, which was used to create an Android application for a Nexus One.
"You don’t need to have a high-powered computer on hand," insists David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate in mechanical engineering at MIT. "Once you've created the reduced model, you can do all the computations on a phone."
Though this kind of model reduction has been done before, TACC says the MIT system's real advantage is its rigorous error bounds, which tell the user the range of possible solutions, and provide a metric of whether an answer is accurate or not.
Knezevic goes on to say that using a reduced scale model also results in faster computations.
"The payoff for model reduction is larger when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone," he said. "That’s a speed up of orders of magnitude."
Check out MIT for a video of the process in action, or TACC to learn more about how they did it.

"Sensational Journalism"
Please stop giving such heading to future articles. Your readers are not dumb.
This is not the sun or playboy that you are reading....
my 2 cents only.
*opinions expressed are mine only. not meant to degrade or harm others.*
the average gamin computer has exponentially more power than the original 'Supercomputers' that were used to send man to space.
by any solid definition, just about every advanced computer made today short of a netbook could be classed as a supercomputer.
Expected supercomputers, not dumbed down simulations that run on smartphones.
Write more accurate names in the future, tom's hardware!
ok hands me cash and toms right an article about this "super computer"
You just can't put a smartphone on the market which has the same price as a laptop or pc.
A cellphone is made for calling and texting, that's it, everything else (apps ecc.) after a week of use or so, is becoming annoying and useless, unless you're a 14 years old kid who thinks he's cool having a smartphone.
WRONG!! In Binary, 2+2=100. You see, the (1) in said number = 4, while the second 0 would equal 2, and the last 0 would equal 0 or 1.
Using that logic, your answer was wrong, so i deserve the cash more than you!
"Sensational Journalism"
Please stop giving such heading to future articles. Your readers are not dumb.
This is not the sun or playboy that you are reading....
my 2 cents only.
*opinions expressed are mine only. not meant to degrade or harm others.*
you just discriminated me by age :$. i only want touchscreen smartphones coz of their browsing easiness and multimedia capabilities. why i want those is they are very handy when you are not going to be home for sometime, perhaps a road trip or waiting somewhere someplace.. whats more nice than just playing a movie and watching it until the end and then you suddenly realize you have passed that much time, which would otherwise be spent struggling with boredom.
Agreed, there maybe those who think its real cool, but they just dont know the technical stuff within, and how badly their *supercomputer* smartphone would SUCK in a real race with a real gaming computer
I have a friend who got an iPhone cause he might have to use it when he waits at the doctor once or twice a year, said he didn't want a netbook because what if he had to stand while he was waiting.
Seems to me for the $ vs time you put in you could spend it wiser. Seems to me, a little planning +cheap cell phone + portable gaming unit +netbook is easier on the eyes and wallet than iPhone + monthly rent for it + off chance it'll be useful in any meaningful way that couldn't have been accomplished easier or better. I put it in the same category as a shoe-phone. All-in-One? Ya. Stupid idea to do two things poorly, ya.
I know people love their smart phones, and I agree, they are neat, and probably the way phones are going to keep going, faster and better, but don't rationalize how awesome your phone is by telling me it's now a supercomputer, after telling me it's going to replace my desktop next week.
One day, maybe it will, blue tooth keyboard and mouse and a fast enough GPU when hooked up to my incredibly larger than 3in monitor, I can understand if I can use it without paying rent on it every month maybe. Then again, I enjoy building hot rods and don't own a prius.
I will love when we'll have powerful desktop class CPUs/GPUs on systems the size of smartphones that could work on small clusters. Maybe in 20-30 years. They will need to be 50-100 times smaller and will consume what a smartphone system consumes today, or even less. For 95% of people a 2-4 Ghz quad-core arm cpu could be all they need "forever", so it makes sense the average computer system of tomorrow to be pocket size.
A smartphone today is what a desktop was 12 years ago. In 12-20 years more could we have todays systems on this size and power?
The other approach could be to have just a terminal and buy the power you need from your network cloud service provider.
I hope you say this in regards to porting android to a machine more powerful than a smart phone. You might as well fold on a low power PIII otherwise. Not to mention the battery life reduction. Then there is also the fact that any other app you want to use on the phone will be reduced to a crawl.
folding uses a cpu (or gpu's if you have them) to its maximum capability. Smart phones (I would estimate) are under about a 5% load on average.
This comment is very ignorant. You are putting your opinion out there as fact, which is stupid. I personally use a lot of apps on a daily basis on my Blackberry which are quite useful to my daily life. GPS apps help me get to client locations quickly, weather apps let me know the conditions I'll be driving in, and receiving my email on my phone lets me stay in touch with various clients when I'm not in the office, and update my calendar to easily view my next appointments. I also read off the kindle app nearly every day during down time. I do agree that a lot of the various sound boxes and lightsaber apps do get old quickly, but there a ton of useful business orientated apps out there being used daily by a lot of people.