Newswise — The current strategy for building supercomputers is to take advantage of the general-purpose microprocessors found in fast desktop computers or file servers. One problem with this approach is that it is very power intensive. So the cost of the electricity to operate such a supercomputer can be prohibitive.
A better strategy for the future may be to build supercomputers tailored for particular computations, using the kinds of low-power microprocessors found in today's smart-phones and similar portable devices. That would ease the power requirements enormously without sacrificing performance, because the processors used would be very efficient, having been designed expressly for the computational task at hand. High-resolution climate modeling provides an illustrative example of what might be accomplished with this approach.
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