Question: Since most of your work is done on computers, how difficult would your work be if computers weren't as developed as they are now?

Simon Albright answered on 12 Mar 2014:

Incredibly difficult is the short answer.

I use a facility on campus called a cluster, this is basically a stack of PCs like the one I’m using now all wired together. By sending groups of simulations off to the cluster I can get them to run a lot faster. The difference this makes is huge, after about 2 1/2 years of my PhD I’d used more than 30 years worth of computer time. In other words if clusters didn’t exist it would take a single computer working non-stop about 30 years to repeat what I’ve done.

Of course computers weren’t always as advanced as they are now and people still got a lot done. All it would mean is that I would have to be much more careful and selective in what I simulated. At the moment I can stick 1000 simulations on the cluster and if after a couple of days I want to rerun them it’s only an inconvenience, if I had to run them on a single machine it would be a lot more than that!