AUUGN on the Web - Volume 16, Number 1:

Scientific computing - A forgotten discipline?

Brian Salter-Duke < b_duke@lacebark.ntu.edu.au >

Phil McCrea's comment in his President's Page (Vol 15, No 6, p.7),

"Very few computers are used for number crunching these days - possibly only supercomputers, and the odd spreadsheet calculation"

... is so far off reality that I am beginning to think there is a conspiracy to drive us poor scientific computing folk out of the computing world by pretending we do not exist. After all, the ACS has ignored us for years and now seems to think computing is just a branch of business management. I thought AUUG would know better.

It is wrong in two ways. First, lots of computers are used for number crunching. Second, they are not only supercomputers. Most number crunching these days is done on UNIX workstations.

I have used the ANU Supercomputer and may use it again, but I do not use it now. Last year, three colleagues and I obtained a DEET Infrastructure grant that has purchased two DEC Alpha 3000/800s. Both are now flat out number crunching. I also have a small IBM RISC 6000 and access to a larger university one. I often drive these hard crunching numbers. My field is computational chemistry and it is a rapidly growing field. In the US the number of graduates employed in this area has been growing exponentially for 10 years. Most are in industry. Many workstation vendors have specifically targetted this group in their sales material. Computational chemistry does include some symbol manipulation and some CAD-like graphics, but it uses lots of cpu hours crunching numbers. Most of it is done on workstations. Some is done on fast PCs (you should have seen the fuss in our community about the pentium floating point bug - it matters). The supercomputer is often the last resort for really big tasks. Computational chemistry is just one of the activities that is still happily crunching numbers. What about environemntal modelling, weather forcasting etc. All these activities are growing, not declining. The very complex modelling of all aspects of our complex world will show a vast expansion in the next few decades.

The move here to workstations from mainframes and supercomputers has implications for AUUG. People like me are now also system administrators and we need to know a lot more about the operating system than we did 20 or more years ago (I go back 35 years to Mercury Autocode!). The operating system is now almost always UNIX.

While the major of PCs are text manipulators, I estimate a majority of workstations spend a significant part of their time number crunching. The people who run them need the support of AUUG. Just my $0.02 worth.