According to recent report, a team of researchers at MIT has developed a way of bringing supercomputing power to the Android phone. Said team at MIT has been working with colleagues from the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) to develop the application.
A series of simulations on the Ranger supercomputer were already completed to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a slightly less costly front-end: the Android Smarphone. They were then able to solve problems on the phone and visualize the results on the fly. The project proved the potential for reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations for complicated problems on handheld devices.
While the use of small-scale devices to perform such calculations is not new, MIT work is trying to add a system of error bounds which provides a range of possible solutions and a metric as to whether an answer is accurate or not.
There’s no need to have a high-powered computer on hand, once a reduced model has been created, all the computations can be done on the phone. But the question is how much accuracy will be lost with the reduced model? Thus, MIT can say that they are doing supercomputing on the Android smartphone.
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