Developing applications for smartphones is a true sport for researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Advanced Computing Center know. A recent collaboration between these two institutes resulted in the creation of an Android app that can turn your Android cellphones into a super calculating computer.

The teams has developed via numerous simulations, a smaller and simplified model of the Ranger-super computer, which could be used to calculate instant answers for problems, whereby a gigantic machine like the Ranger would usually take a day or two to do so. Super computers also aren’t mobile-friendly, therefore they can’t be easily brought to field experiments, while with this handy app you can always have a device in hand that could help you solve problems in no time.

Like all benchmarks, however, you need to take this one with a pinch of salt. The smartphone app has to be customized for the problem it is solving, so it’s not quite as universal.

“If a researcher came along with a problem, he would have to code up his own equation within the framework to represent it on the phone, what he would develop would be specific to the problem.”, according to John Peterson, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

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