

Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science - JesseAldridge
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/supercomputers.html

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JesseAldridge
"Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed astronomical just two years
ago, won't just allow faster computations. These computers will enable
entirely new types of science that couldn't have been done before. This new
generation of petascale machines will move scientific simulation beyond just
supporting the two main branches of science, theory and experimentation, and
into the foreground. Instead of just hypotheses being tested with experiments
and observations, large-scale extrapolation and prediction of things we can't
observe or that would be impractical for an experiment, will become central to
many scientific endeavors.

'It's getting to the point where simulation is actually the third branch of
science,' Seager said. 'We say that nature is always the arbiter of truth, but
it turns out our ability to observe nature is fundamentally limited.'"

