Supercomputing on an Android Phone [Supercomputing]

It looks like an outlandish claim, but the brainiacs at MIT and the Texas Advanced Computing Center insist that they’ve created an Android app it really is genuinely capable of doing supercomputing on a phone. Here’s how they did it:

First, the researchers performed a fancy series of calculations on the Ranger supercomputer-one who only a real, take-up-a-whole-room supercomputer could handle-and then generated a reduced model of the effects. They turned that model into an Android app, loaded it on a Nexus One, and then were in a position to adjust the parameters of the complex data set and visualize the implications in seconds, from virtually anywhere.

The researchers claim the app is real-deal because for the error introduced by the reduced model, and tells the user various solutions for the given parameters. Among the researchers explains, ” We’ve got a bound on how much accuracy we’re losing with our reduced model, that allows you to say with rigor that we’re doing supercomputing on a phone.”

The team thinks this sort of system will in all probability have real world applications, in fields like landmine detection, architectural modeling, or performance optimization for cars or planes. One researcher suggested that the reduced model app could receive input data from sensors and dictate small optimizations, say to an aircraft’s ailerons or flaps, on the fly.

But simply showing how the smartphones we stock can be utilized to tackle complex computational tasks is impressive in and of itself. As one of several TACC researchers said, ” It’s demonstrating that with a small processor, you could get a meaningful answer to on oversize problem.” [TACC via Slashdot]

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This post is tagged: android, phone, supercomputing