Shared Supercomputing and Everyday Research

For decades, the world's supercomputers have been the tightly guarded property of universities and governments. But what would happen if regular folks could get their hands on one? The price of supercomputers is dropping quickly, in part because they are often built with the same off-the-shelf parts found in PCs, as a supercomputing conference here last week made clear. Just about any organization with a few million dollars can now buy or assemble a top-flight machine. Meanwhile, research groups and companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Intel are finding ways to make vast stores of information available online through so-called cloud computing. These advances are pulling down the high walls around computing-intensive research. A result could be a democratization that gives ordinary people with a novel idea a chance to explore their curiosity with heavy computing firepower — and maybe find something unexpected. The trend has spurred some of the world's top computing experts and scientists to work toward freeing valuable stores of information. The goal is to fill big computers with scientific data and then let anyone in the world with a PC, including amateur scientists, tap into these systems.