In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains,
weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just
as difficult to figure out what's actually going on in the model—how
it's organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to
answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that
the simulation is modeling.
So building a highly accurate simulation of
a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately
understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having
one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you
now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a
simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the
original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the
models implementation in hardware and software.
In other supercomputer news, the record for fastest computer was recently broken:
Jaguar’s spot atop the list marks the first time a civilian
Department of Energy computer has been the most powerful in the world.
Instead of modeling nuclear explosions, which is Roadrunner’s primary
job, Jaguar carries out scientific research on the globe’s climate and
other computational-intensive problems.
