

If you had an exaflop computer today, what would you do with it? - Devilboy

Imagine you magically had a supercomputer from 5 or 10 years in the future. It's only a few dozen racks and it scores one exaflop on the LINPACK benchmark. What would you use it for?
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mchannon
Sell it. (Probably in pieces to a few different interested buyers) :-)

Aside from making jobs for people in the US supercomputing industry, I don't
see any application for faster versions of these same CPU-style supercomputers
beyond low-rent stuff like climate modeling and physics research.

If the time traveling supercomputer's manufacturers start heading in the GPU
direction, mining Bitcoin would be a pretty good way to monetize the
appliance, if selling it wasn't an option.

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danwills
I would use it to render huge fractal images, do interesting and complicated
path tracing (ie physically-based raytracing in mantra or luxrender), and
explore reaction-diffuson simulations. All assuming, of course, that
completeley parallel and compatible code is available for all of these. Edit:
happy to write such code myself too.

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dalke
Rent it out to people who want the compute power. Sell it to the same. Nothing
I'm doing needs that much ability, so the profit from selling it could easily
fund the purchase and use of a more moderate system, as well as fund other
projects I'm interested in seeing done.

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daurnimator
For everyone here that says "sell it":

The better approach is to meticulously disassemble it, and patent the crap out
of everything inside.

Then replicate it and sell them!

After 10 years you should license the patent for free.

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mchannon
It's hard enough in this day and age to make something using its patent as a
guide, even though by definition that's what a patent is supposed to show you
how to do.

The reverse is next to impossible. If I had an Apple A8 chip from 2019, I
might get some good ideas on what it's made out of, but not what processes
Apple used to make it. Furthermore, many of the patents used in 5-10 years
have already been applied for.

Playing time-traveling patent troll is also fraught with other problems- many
innovations come precisely because they aren't already patented by someone
else. Rather than giving into the extortion they may just push their research
in a different direction and still achieve their performance goals, making
your patents somewhat worthless.

Licensing a patent for free is silly- just abandon it when your 7.5 or 11.5
fees come due.

The one thing that would have significant resale value would be the
supercomputer's software (assuming it wasn't something really esoteric), since
5-10 years' worth of hard work on the part of thousands of programmers could
be skipped. That's assuming that was included with the supercomputer and you
don't have to send for it (Doc Brown style).

