At-Your-Service Specialized Apps When Needed

摘要

Before the advent of powerful and inexpensive 32- and 64-bit desktop computers, engineers needing to run complex simulations or heavy-duty computations had to rent time on a supercomputer, or use high-performance systems that were shared by other parts of their organization. That practice has waned as desktop systems are increasingly capable of handling many of the tasks that we had to offload to larger systems. But we keep finding more and more difficult problems for supercomputers to solve, so offloading jobs to these computers never entirely went away.