RE: Research team develops Raspberry Pi supercomputer

e14 Contributor — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:17:16 GMT

Last year, my daughter Mary was in kindergarten with a classmate named James. I don't know his last name, and it would be an amazing coincidence, but perhaps it is the same James Cox described as a member of the University of Southampton research team, who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing. Our James was known for his skill with Lego, and he was taken with supercomputing like other kids are taken with dinosaurs. Our James was precocious enough that perhaps he skipped straight from kindergarten to University.

We heard many stories from Mary about James. Their teacher, Ms. Mildred, explained the alphabet and the digits by saying that both were ordered sets of symbols. James disagreed. He said that while order was essential for the digits, it was arbitrary for the letters. Ms. Mildred asked how James would use a dictionary or a phone book if it wasn't in alphabetic order. He said that's only a problem for the dead tree version. James thought the digits were much more important than the letters. Ms. Mildred said if that's so, tell me why there are 26 letters but only 10 digits. James said supercomputers used only 2 digits. Ms. Mildred didn't believe him, but didn't want to argue.

Ms. Mildred gave homework with problems like

+ 3

--------

where the answer is supposed to be written under the line. James told her that it would be better to write the problems as an equation, such as

2 + 3 = ___

She asked what difference that would make. He said it would be good preparation for algebra (he liked algebra), because you could move the answer blank anywhere in the problem, like 2 + ___ = 5.

Ms. Mildred asked if supercomputers could do algebra. She was pretty sure that if they were just fast calculators, that they couldn't, because algebra doesn't just use numbers, it also uses the letters that James wasn't so fond of. James said that not only could supercomputers solve single equations, but they could solve more than one equation at the same time. Ms. Mildred didn't know what he was talking about. He explained that a farmer has 10 animals, some cows and some chickens. Together the animals have 28 legs. A supercomputer could use LU decomposition to tell you that the farmer had 4 cows and 6 chickens. That's why LU decomposition was such an important supercomputer benchmark.

But Ms. Mildred thought she could have figured that out by guess-and-check, or maybe even by finding the intersection of two lines. James told her that supercomputers could solve millions of simultaneous equations. Ms. Mildred couldn't imagine why you would ever need to do that. James said math gives you wings. Ms. Mildred looked that up and showed the class the video she found.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxqpaCCPvY