ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the present and future computers and computer architecture for scientific computation and, furthermore, their prospect in a wider perspective of the general theory of information. It explains the technique of information or data processing and its applications in handling simulation data. The chapter analyzes a complex many-body system; it must be content with representing it by macroscopic variables such as density, fluid velocity and temperature. In the respect of information processing, the present day supercomputers are basically the von Neumann machine. The dynamical simulation of multidimensional field theories, such as the high Reynolds-number Navier-Stokes equation, demands an extreme capacity of computers. The cellular automaton algorithm for the fluid simulation aims at both natural parallelism of computation and treatment of all bits on an equal footing. People frequently do more than one thing at a time, like driving a car while listening to the radio.