Imagine subjecting Shakespeare to a computationalprocess like bioinformatics--not to chop the poor guy into DNA base pairs but to tease out 1, 000-word pieces (or strings) of his plays.
All told, nearly three-quarters of the servers in the sample were using less than 10 percent of their computational brainpower, on average, to process data.
Most recently, a team from Stanford took the helm of Sequoia to run computational fluid dynamics simulations -- a process that requires a finely tuned balance of computation, memory and communication components -- in order to better understand engine noise from supersonic jets.
Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working on a program that will automate this process, too.