Importance of Computers—The Knowledge Economy

Amid all this change, computing has become a symbol for our creativity and productivity and a barometer in the effort to maintain our competitive position in the world arena. The development of the computer, and its spread through industry, government, and education, has brought forth the emergence of knowledge as the critical new commodity in today's global economy. In fact, computers and computer science have become the principal enabling technology of the knowledge economy.

Supercomputers, in particular, are increasingly important to design and manufacturing processes in diverse industries: oil exploration, aeronautics and aerospace, pharmaceuticals, energy, transportation, automobiles, and electronics, just to name the most obvious examples. They have become an essential instrument in the performance of research, a new tool to be used alongside modeling, experimentation, and theory, that pushes the frontiers of knowledge, generates new ideas, and creates new fields. They are also making it possible to take up old problems—like complex-systems theory, approaches to nonlinear systems, genome mapping, and three-dimensional modeling of full aircraft configurations—that were impractical to pursue in the past.

We are only in the beginning of a general exploitation of supercomputers that will profoundly affect academia, industry, and the service sector. During the first 30 years of their existence, computers fostered computer science and engineering and computer architecture. More recently, we have seen the development of computational science and engineering as a means of performing sophisticated research and design tasks. Supercomputer technology and network and graphics technology, coupled with mathematical methods for algorithms, are the basis for this development.

Also, we have used the von Neumann architecture for a long time. Only recently is a new approach in massive parallelism developing. The practical importance of supercomputers will continue to increase as their technological capabilities advance, their user access improves, and their use becomes more simple.