Smarr is filling a nature reserve at UC Irvine with sensors to transmit environmental data to San Diego supercomputers, which are modeling weather patterns, seismic activity and behavior of animal populations.
Huang is now turning his focus beyond gamers to a host of new customers that will need number-crunching power: oil companies doing deep-sea seismic analysis, Wall Street banks modeling portfolio risk and biologists visualizing molecular structures to find drug target sites.