I ve been playing the game for years but still at times feel like a novice. I have friends who have played the game for a matter of weeks, they feel they can take on anyone and beat them.

(Gregory V. Wilson) When I first started doing computational science in 1986, a new generation of fast, cheap chips had just ushered in the current era of low-cost supercomputers, in which multiple processors work in parallel on a single problem. Suddenly, it seemed as though everyone who took number crunching seriously was rewriting his or her software to take advantage of these new machines. Sure, it hurt—the compilers that translated programs to run on parallel computers were flaky, debugging tools were nonexistent, and thinking about how to solve problems in parallel was often like trying to solve a thousand crossword puzzles at once—but the potential payoff seemed enormous. Many investigators were positive that within a few years, computer modeling would let scientists investigate a whole range of phenomena that were too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too dangerous or too complicated to examine in the lab or to analyze with pencil and paper.