What's indisputable is that supercomputing has become the "third pillar" of doing science, alongside theory and experimentation. The best way to grasp the power of Titan, says Bronson Messer, a computational astrophysicist at Oak Ridge, is not to compare it to a Formula 1 racing car or a turbocharged engine, but to the Large Hadron Collider. "Titan is like the particle accelerator, and the simulations and applications that we run on Titan are like the detectors that discovered the Higgs boson," Messer says. "The size or power of these machines isn't what pushes science forward. It's the people using them, who know what to look for."
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