Comment on What are super-computers used for ?
truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 8 hours ago
If your gaming computer can do x computations every month, and you need to run a simulation that requires 1000x computations, you can wait 1000 months, or have 1000 computers work on it in parallel and have it done in one month.
Tanoh@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Keep in mind that not all work loads scale perfectly. You might have to add 1100 computers due to overhead and other dcaling issues. It is still pretty good though, and most of those clusters work on highly parallelised tasks, as they are very suited for it.
There are other work loads do not scale at all. Like the old joke in programming. “A project manager is someone that thinks that 9 women can have a child in one month.”