Comments on: How to use Amazon Cloud supercomputers to view molecules in remarkable detail

By: someone

someone — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 05:07:20 +0000

It seems the main advantage of using Amazon for this kind of task is sharing of information – via AMIs (so that other researchers can just take their machine image, launch it, and continue working on it).
As far as cost effectiveness, it would probably be cheaper in the long run for a department to buy a rack of servers, than to pay Amazon hourly rates (the most expensive cloud service currently on the market).

By: twm114

twm114 — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:40:35 +0000

‘from nine days to under three and a half hours’ – beautiful! So can we expect a lot more pictures?

By: Doug Safarik

Doug Safarik — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:22:57 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA3XCvrK90

By: Damon

Damon — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:17:31 +0000

Define human.

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 08:20:59 +0000

Yes, I don’t think there’s any difference in human tasks here (except for IT skills in using cloud supercomputers — possibly requiring additional staff for smaller labs). The key variable is computer processing time and thus overall throughput.

By: asiwel

asiwel — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:14:54 +0000

We need to apply some reason here when we talk about what machines can do versus “job loss.” Why have computers when we could hire 1000′s of people to run abacuses. In that the cloud here saves “processing time”, whether by hand or by desktop PC, that means possibly you or I can afford it or do it .. when otherwise possibly we couldn’t have done so. Alternately, here perhaps the cloud computer is doing something that would be forever impossible or unreasonable to do by hand – so no “jobs” like that would ever be there to lose. When you try to save certain types of jobs, that really only means that only the 1% may be able to have them performed and millions who might could benefit (if cost were reasonable) are left without. This is simply the Henry Ford logic of mass production versus cost.

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 03:15:02 +0000

The calculations are intended to extract information from microscope images. The calculations do not require a supercomputer; they can be done with a desktop computer, but that takes a long time. The program extracts information from the fuzzy image (see the top picture on the left) from the microscope to show more details (right).

By: Glen Lincoln

Glen Lincoln — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:51:34 +0000

I still don’t understand how doing ginormous super computer calculations has the ability to make microscopes perform better in spite of the wavelength of light not permitting ten nanometer size imaging. There’s a gap in my conceptualization of the trick here, but I gotta say, I commend you for an exceptionally interesting and readable article.

By: Bri

Bri — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:57:42 +0000

Since we are supposed to have our heads in the clouds in order to get work in the future, this article is a window into what that might entail..The cloud is very impressive at data processing. It’s like renting time on a supercomputer. The cloud saved a lot of processing time so all those work hours in data processing have been reduced. My guess is that would translate into some job loss for those that would have processed this information. Those people are different from the ones interpreting the data. Google’s cloud servers are basically a soft AI so there aren’t that many human jobs in association with that step. Once we get down to the data interpretation that is a job for a highly trained human. One strong Watsonesq or should I say Sherlockesq AI would learn how to interpret the data and process that faster than s human could. We could leave the data interpretation to a strong AI in the cloud but there goes some more jobs. I don’t know, it still looks to me like robots and strong AI will take all the jobs, no matter how sexy this cloud service appears.