Furiously exploding stars and wispy supernova remnants. All these components contribute to the astronomer's view of the universe. Yet it's a limited, fragmented view. Missing from this picture is the continuity of stellar evolution, from dusty cloud to nascent, fiery ball to mature star to death by collapse and perhaps explosion. Unable to observe the entire sequence on a human time scale, astronomers must find other means of assembling the puzzle.
Computer simulation offers a potential shortcut.
Md. Unfortunately, today's most advanced number crunchers have neither the speed nor the storage capacity to handle more than a crude caricature of any given cosmic process. Other fields have similar needs. Whether simulating turbulent air flow, modeling protein folding, mining huge stores of data for valuable nuggets of information, or visualizing interactions between brush fires, wind, and rain in a watershed, current technology lags far behind what researchers dream of doing. It was a chance for experts to peer at least 2 decades into the future, to do some creative, imaginative thinking while providing a realistic assessment of the opportunities, challenges, and critical elements of achieving truly high-performance computing. Using pencil and paper, a person might take a minute or more to multiply 0.026 by 431.2 to get the answer 11.2112, manually keeping track of where to put the decimal point.