How powerful would a NASA supercomputer be for gaming?

[Arsenal Pro]

Title

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

terrible ...

[vexviron]

Автор сообщения: Lemonfed

terrible ...

Exactly that...

Built for performance, not for graphics capabilities.

[ṼṏẌṏḭḊ]

Too powerful.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

You couldnt probably even launch a game, this is not what they are for.

[628]

Still can't handle PUBG in stable 60fps

[Ⓥenom Ⓢnake 🐍]

Does NASA still use supercomputers? I thought they stopped doing that after the cray generation. Or am I remembering that wrong?

I was pretty sure it was seti that was using supercomputers just for data processing. And I don't think they do that anymore. there are a lot cheaper and more efficient ways of getting significantly more horsepower out of a computer. And I'm pretty sure they still do shared data processing. Kind of like a Beowulf cluster.

[ʙᴜɴ.ᴇ]

it won't have a beefy gpu or anything a gaming computer needs.

so performance in games would actually be quite bad, if it can even run a game at all.

[TheRandomGuy]

Depends

If the game you tried to run uses the CPU more than the GPU, then NASA computers would be well suited.

However, if it relied on a GPU heavily, for any sort of heavy graphics, it's performance would be abysmal as NASA computers are probably built for computations and other CPU related tasks such as data processing. They really wouldn't need a super expensive GPU, and even if they did it wouldn't be a gaming one, but one designed for performing other non-gaming tasks, as such, the graphics drivers wouldn't be optimized for gaming on that chip, if it had such a thing to begin with, after all.

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

there are even very powerfull Xeon server cpu that just can't run games even if you give them the best graphic card ever , if it's not optimised for gaming then no , the performances will either be similar or worst then you typical home computer.

[↑↑↓↓←→←→BASelect]

The government is still using them huge wall computers from the 1950's. They can't afford new computers seeing how they spend 20 grand per toilet seat.

[Zekiran]

Автор сообщения: I Was Here But Now I'm Gone

The government is still using them huge wall computers from the 1950's. They can't afford new computers seeing how they spend 20 grand per toilet seat.

While this is a bit of hyperbole, it's not untrue in the slightest. A hardware company I worked with did DOD contracting.

They had to run early DOS, nothing later.

So: super computers from government agencies? Not gonna run your games.

Super computers that Disney, Pixar, and other animation studios use? THOSE would be the ones you want...

[TheRandomGuy]

Автор сообщения: Zekiran

Автор сообщения: I Was Here But Now I'm Gone

The government is still using them huge wall computers from the 1950's. They can't afford new computers seeing how they spend 20 grand per toilet seat.

While this is a bit of hyperbole, it's not untrue in the slightest. A hardware company I worked with did DOD contracting.

They had to run early DOS, nothing later.

So: super computers from government agencies? Not gonna run your games.

Super computers that Disney, Pixar, and other animation studios use? THOSE would be the ones you want...

Not surprising the DoD uses Dinosaur computers. Can't have your computers get hacked if they literally pre-date the invention of the Internet itself.

Also, to add on, a company I worked for not too long ago used old computers, not sure if they were DOS (they kinda looked like it, no GUI, black screen, etc.) to run production lines in a factory. They just didn't want to pay for newer stuff as it'd involve new software, learning it, and training people to use it over the old system.

[AD]

Probably not good. They are built for other things that they are (very likely) much better at then any gaming computer, but they are not good at gaming.

[The Rock God]

Not any better than a good desktop.

Software has to be written for the hardware to get maximum performance out of it. Until recently a lot of games were basically single threaded. You needed a computer that could run one thread very fast for best performance. When consoles got better games started using more threads (which is why most recent games require a quad core CPU). You now, basically, need a processor that can run four threads very fast. Basically, because it's better to have more threads for handling part of the GPU load that can be sent to the CPU. I doubt there's a game out there that will take full advantage of a CPU with eight threads right now.
Now look at a supercomputer. They achieve their performance by being massively threaded. Tens of thousands of threads. (Maybe even hundreds of thousands now.) They aren't fast - they just do a lot of things at once.* Running a program that can only use four or eight threads on such a machine will offer no advantage over one that can only use the four or eight threads the program can actually use.
An analogy: A jumbo jet can carry 500 passengers across the ocean at 600 mph, taking ten hours for the flight. Having only 100 passengers doesn't make it a a two hour flight at 3000 mph, nor does having no passengers make the plane instantly teleport thousands of miles in the blink of an eye.

*This is also how modern GPUs work. In the old days you would do the calculations to make a line, then draw it. Modern GPUs have thousands of cores calculating thousands of lines at the same time. Modern supercomputers are basically a ton of of GPUs working together. Or, more accurately, modern GPUs are cheaper variations of the cards used in supercomputers.

[Naedmi]

I always thought NASA never used supercomputers, it was always some cheap Dell computers since they were too underfunded for supercomputers, they'd have to ask the military to donate one of their 300 supercomputers.