| Sumario: | The article looks at supercomputing as of July 2004. Supercomputing had its heyday in the 1980s. The field attracted many of the best minds in computer science, as start-ups and established companies vied for the prestige of creating the fastest computer in the world. The ability to build powerful computers cheaply, combined with growing commercial demand for high-end computing power, is creating a renaissance in the field of supercomputing. Two applications in particular have driven the development of supercomputers: the modelling of climate change and of what happens inside a nuclear explosion--the second of which is necessary because of the ban on actual nuclear testing that is obeyed by established nuclear powers. Supercomputers are also good for modelling the way proteins fold and, it has been thought, should be useful at helping to predict which drugs might work. At the International Supercomputer Conference, held in Heidelberg, Germany in 2004, Steve Wallach, a vice-president of Chiaro, a router manufacturer based in Richardson, Texas, and a supercomputer expert, suggested that supercomputer hardware may have to relinquish some performance in order to make the systems easier to program.
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