Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: computational science
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Lessons from the Gulf of Mexico
The computational demands of an integrated, fully multidisciplinary, parametric simulation study of the oil spill and all of its effects would make today’s complex models seem like child’s play on an abacus by comparison.
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In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico
The wide dynamic range of temporal and spatial scales of systems biology models, from picosecond first principles molecular dynamics to the geological timescales of environmental shifts, is a full employment act for computational scientists. In many ways, we are attempting to come full circle, from in vivo observations to in vitro experiments to holistic, in…
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Serial Dismay, Parallel Excitement
Cloud services now operate on the largest computing systems we have ever built on this planet, with service reliability expectations far higher than what we demand from scientific applications. Thus, I also believe there are lessons from cloud computing that are potentially applicable to computational science applications.
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Bridging Cultures for Collaboration
One group was dressed in t-shirts, shorts and sandals and would have blended nicely with the nearby beachgoers. The second group was dressed in conservative business suits that would not have drawn a second glance in the corporate world. Imagine my surprise when I saw members of both groups entering the building where I was…
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On Getting The “Right” Answer
The parallel application contains millions of lines of code, combining multiple models of physical, engineering, biological, social and/or economic processes, operating over temporal and spatial scales that span ten orders of magnitude. What is the probability that any execution of this code produces the “right” answer? Does a “right” answer even exist? If so, how…
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Scientific Clouds: Blowin’ in the Wind
Cirrus, stratus, altostratus, cumulus: they are the scientific names of the common clouds. They drift across the sky, reflecting the changing wind and weather. A new front is blowing into computational science, and cloud computing will soon advance scientific and engineering discovery.