

Ask HN: What would you do if you had access to a supercomputer for a week? - kahseng

Say one day you are told that you can get a whole week's access to a cheap supercomputer (think: 64-cores, 512GB RAM, 4TB space...not cloud computing) for FREE.  Before that, you can do all your planning, designing, write code, etc.  What would you do?<p>(for your startup, for mankind, for fun, etc...)
======
vparihar
Assuming I have protein strains data for Alzheimer’s patients along with their
ancestors data and assuming I know the protein which if in excess causes this
disease, I can attempt to find out what can be a possible cause of this
disease. Supercomputer will be really helpful to these kind of pattern
matching searches and run protein visualization tools.

------
qhoxie
I would secure access for longer than a week:

./john /etc/shadow

~~~
richcollins
Only today I heard a story from a friend about a lab assistant he worked with
that did just that in the early nineties. The only mistake he made was calling
the executable "password-cracker".

------
gaius
Or, say in 1988 you were told you could have a 2008 PC for a week... That's a
bigger jump in power for most people than what you're suggesting.

~~~
kahseng
Indeed, but I'm being realistic here. This isn't just a hypothetical "wouldn't
it be nice if...".

------
lacker
Heck, I've had access to a supercomputer for years and I still don't know what
to do with it "to help mankind".

------
umangjaipuria
Run my map-reduce as a single task. :)

~~~
kahseng
I did think of that, but I realized that there wasn't too much additional
value because map-reduce can be run cheaply enough on Hadoop clusters via EC2.
I wonder if there are other ideas that this would open up.

------
decadentcactus
Rent it out to other programmers ;)

------
ram1024
de-pixelate censored images?

...what, no?

