Computing power, growth

Growth in computer power and capability has continued unabated over the past five years, along with a wider dissemination of these capabilities to research and development (R D) workers (e.g., scientists, technologists, and managers) in the field of applied polymer... 

Taken together, these performance levels represent a million-fold improvement over present-day computers. This means that the current rate of exponential growth in computing power will be sustained for another half century if carbon-based computers were to become commodity items by 2050. It may then be feasible to implement a finite-element model of a complete human at a cellular level. 

For Marx, the task of establishing how a capitalist economy can reproduce itself is not limited to a particular period of production. The reproduction examples that he carves out in the final part of Capital, volume 2, show how balanced reproduction can take place over an extended number of years. Despite the limitations he faced, with a lack of formal modelling tools, computing power and waning personal health - the reproduction schemes were one of his last contributions to political economy - Marx was able to devise complex numerical examples, in which somehow a 10 per cent rate of growth is sustained in each period of production. It is not for nothing that he has been described as the father of modem growth theory. 

Clearly, such a projection is fanciful. Although it is widely believed that computer power will continue to grow at current rates for about the next decade or so, it is not possible to predict how long such a growth rate can continue. On the other hand, it is not necessary to simulate the hill life cyde of an intad bacterium. Such a simulation would be extreme overkill, since it would describe the synthesis and folding of every molecule in the cell, with atomic detail. 

The availabihty, at a reasonable price, of computer power, along with the various associated peripherals that are imperative for a viable computer system, is seen as being the most important influence on future growth in this area. Recent years have seen the dechne of the mainframe due to the increased power and availabihty of the personal computer. Today s Pentium-based IBM-compatible PCs with 100 MHz internal clocks and SOO megabyte hard disks are a far cry from those that were popular with chemists a decade ago. 

All in all, the continued growth of computer power and development of theory and its algorithmic implementation will enable more physics e.g. van der Waals interactions, electron self-interaction, entropic effects) to be correctly captured and enable ultimately more speedy, accurate, and comprehensive (multi-scale and multi-phasic) simulations. Theory will be an ever more indispensible ally of experiment and continue to supply detail knowledge on molecular transformations, thereby propelling the growth of heterogeneous catalysis and enriching our world in years to come. 

Today, however, one senses that there has been an exponential growth in computational power.This change in circumstances raises the question of whether we should reexamine our attitudes. Is it possible that the time is at hand when... 

There has been a phenomenal growth of interest in theoretical simulations over the past decade. The concomitant advances made in computing power and software development have changed the way that computational chemistry research is undertaken. No longer is it the exclusive realm of specialized theoreticians and supercomputers rather, computational chemistry is now accessible via user-friendly programs on moderately priced workstations. State-of-the-art calculations on the fastest, massively parallel machines are continually enlarging the scope of what is possible with these methods. These reasons, coupled with the continuing importance of solid acid catalysis within the world s petrochemical and petroleum industries, make it timely to review recent work on the theoretical study of zeolite catalysis. 

First, the role of system design on the details of convection and solute segregation in industrial-scale crystal growth systems has not been adequately studied. This deficiency is mostly because numerical simulations of the three-dimensional, weakly turbulent convection present in these systems are at the very limit of what is computationally feasible today. New developments in computational power may lift this limitation. Also, the extensive use of applied magnetic fields to control the intensity of the convection actually makes the calculations much more feasible. 

Since computational power has increased enormously in personal computers, and since there is a strong need for maximal compression of multimedia, especially over the internet, it seems reasonable to expect future growth in the development of model-based sound synthesis. Model-based image generation and algorithmic sound synthesis are already under consideration for the MPEG-4 compression standard. 

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