Does the supercomputer Titan, or any supercomputer, have any cool video games on it?

Just Pong and Snake maybe. That’s about all they can handle.

In all seriousness though I highly doubt Titan would be used at all for something like gaming, considering the kind of shit they do at Oak Ridge.

@Darth_Algar What kind of shit they do at Oak Ridge?

High level national security type research and shit.

I doubt it has a decent graphics card and monitor, or even a good mouse.

It’s unlikely that any supercomputer would have any games simply because they’re all “work” machines, whether for a research lab, corporation, or government agency.

Besides, the way they’re set up, they probably wouldn’t make good gaming rigs. First off, they’re likely highly optimized for tasks other than graphics; customized (and probably Linux- based) OS and all. Second, most games can’t handle multi-core CPUs very well, while most supercomputers are not only multi-core, but multi-CPU… and not always one that uses the same instruction set as Intel and AMD chips that games are written for.

While it’s theoretically possible for them to run emulators to handle games (most likely written for Windows), the overhead would cause a significant performance hit. Also, re-read the first paragraph.

Comparing a high-end gaming rig to a supercomputer is like comparing an F1 racecar to an aircraft carrier. One is fast fun while the other is far more utilitarian, and while technically more powerful, uses that power to alter the world as opposed to merely entertain whoever is at the controls.

@jerv I found this on YouTube Watson plays Jeopardy.

@talljasperman Watson is not a gaming computer, it is “a question answering (QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering.” (from Wikipedia).

So it can play Jeopardy, but you can’t play Jeopardy on it,

@zenvelo Can a Watson like computer be used for Fluther.

@talljasperman I guess Watson could be used to answer Fluther questions that have factual answers. But not for opinions or experiences, which make up the bulk of Fluther questions.

Plus you’d have to create an interface for it.

One thing to note is that interface design is relatively new. We had computers for a while before we even had the thought to have an intermediary language (FORTRAN, COBOL….) between people and machine code. And such niceties as user friendliness have enough computing overhead that odds are that any supercomputer won’t bother; you’ll be lucky to have a CLI that makes sense to anyone who doesn’t speak hexadecimal.