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> Sometimes it’s just hard to realize that we’re carrying a super computer in our pockets ...

I mean, that's probably been true since forever. A "super computer" is only super relative to other machines from the same era. If you can compare between eras, you could probably call ENIAC a "supercomputer" and some early pocket calculators "a supercomputer [ENIAC] in your pocket."

In other words "a supercomputer in your pocket" is marketing nonsense.



Not to mention the API and computing model of a supercomputer is vastly different to a phone.


Phones are heterogeneous multi-core devices these days, with sophisticated memory architectures. They don’t have infiniband but that’s not too far from cutting edge HPC node architectures from ~ a decade ago. I am sure you can use MPI on them as well. Sure, nobody needs to run ScaLAPACK or $random_simulation_code on a phone, but AFAIK there’s nothing stopping them.

The difference between a phone and a cluster node is mostly one of use cases, not technology.




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