Supercomputers and Research

The New York Times has an article [here] about the declining cost of supercomputers and what that means for “citizen scientists.”  From my (albeit limited) research experience it seems to me that very little research that would benefit from computing power is there is little research not being done because of lack of computing power.  The difficulties in crunching huge amounts of data are analyzing it in a meaningful way, cleaning it, and asking questions of interest.  But before you can get to that point, you have to have the data collected in one place, which seems to be a much greater bottleneck to research than is supercomputing power.

In general I disagree with the “flattening” power of cheaper supercomputers, for those with technical knowledge to query and analyze data from supercomputers they have always had access.  Those without the knowledge would not benefit from it to begin with.

NYT – Shared Supercomputing and Everyday Research