Supercomputing on Ojammpic!

Would Quantum breakthroughs and AI Supercomputers finally make the elusive super-machine affordable, accessible and lean enough to sit happy next to your coffee mug?

- Pratima H

XS! Two golden alphabets that sound like honey to anyone getting out of a gym and into a shopping aisle. Being able to shrink something that was L to S is never final but always fulfilling. From huge halls housing clunky clusters of metal beasts to mainframes skimmed into client-servers which, too, shrunk into PCs that, later, collapsed themselves to fit ultra-thin smartphones—computing has kept getting leaner, lighter and closer to the Average Joe and Jane. As also predicted very cryptically by all the laws circling the worlds of software and hardware. Things will shrink. And when they do, they will be an arm-length away.

Supercomputers could not have asked for a better moment than now to follow suit. There’s quantum computing rubbing its eyes and asking for its morning beans. There’s AI shouting from the bench press to flex those chips, tone those engines and stretch towards those extra flops. After what we have heard recently (Google’s Willow to Nvidia’s $3000 personal AI supercomputer DIGITS) – looks like things are going to get more trimmed ahead? Does that mean the ‘super’ in computing is all set to get ‘skinny’? Would that mean fitting well into the sizes of affordability, democratisation and efficiency? Or would that mean something counter-intuitive? Like ‘The Rock’ wearing a school-girl’s pretty T-shirt? Would crunched-up turn into crammed-up?

TIGHTER VICTORIAN CORSETS