CASC Newsletter

The press is abuzz with new hardware announcements from industry, and the latest Top500 and Green500 results are announced with much fanfare and, lately, intrigue. All of this focus on the technology is, of course, well-deserved, but we should never lose sight of the fact that innovative advances in software and algorithms further amplify these technological gains. Reducing the computational complexity of a problem through clever algorithms can provide payoffs far beyond the speed-ups from hardware. In fact, that's really why the possibility quantum computing is so attractive: It's not that the hardware is faster per se; it's that the hardware could support algorithms that have polynomial complexity for problems that, classically, have super-polynomial cost (i.e., exact solutions are impractical to compute for all but the smallest problems). Furthermore, for as impressive as modern supercomputers are, when it comes to using them, they are rather opaque and finicky creatures lurking behind a seemingly simple command line prompt.