Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Emergence of Interactive Supercomputing Applications

Some interesting, albeit slightly esoteric, commentary on how current supercomputing applications are becoming more interactive. I guess that most people will think that such a fast computer is bound to be more interactive - kinda like running Windows at warp speed. But most supercomputing applications are still oriented towards solving highly complex math problems, with still a bit of a tendency to "batch processing". This commentary explores why interactivity is so important - those of us used to a desktop environment tend to expect this...but when you bring such interactivity to these really complex problems, some interesting conceptual work begins to happen.