Computer architecture has applications in engineering design and automation, energy resources exploration, and remote sensing. It is used for finite element analysis of complex structures, computational aerodynamics simulations, seismic data processing for oil and gas exploration, and modeling nuclear fusion and reactor safety and control. Future applications include using very powerful computers for direct human-computer interaction through speech and images.

1. Computer Architecture Applications of Computer Architecture

2. Applications of CA Engineering Design and Automation solving design problems wind tunnel experiments for aerodynamics studies Energy Resources Exploration discovery of oils and gas and recovery ensuring nuclear reactor safety

3. Engineering Design and Automation Finite element analysis designs of dams,bridges,ships,supersonic jets , high buildings and space vehicles requires resolution of a large system Computational engineers have developed finite-element code for the dynamic analysis of structures. High-order finite elements are used to describe the spatial behavior. CDC Start-100 and Cyber-205 have been used to implement these computations for structural analysis.

4. Engineering Design and Automation Computational aerodynamics providing new technological capabilities and economies in pressing ahead with aircraft and spacecraft lift and turbulence studies. NASA is seeking to supplement its Illiac-IV to do 3D simulations of wind tunnel tests at gigaflop speeds. Two gigaflops supercomputers known as ‘ Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Facilities’ (NASF) proposed by Control Data Corporation which are capable of simulating complete aircraft design for US government and commercial aircraft companies.

5. Engineering Design and Automation Artificial Intelligence and automation Future supercomputers must directly communicate with human beings in speech , images ,natural languages . Image processing , Pattern recognition , Computer vision , Speech understanding , Machine inference , CAD/CAM/CAI , Intelligence robotics , Expert computer systems , Knowledge engineering Japan launched a national project to develop fifth-generation computers which possess highly intelligent I/O subsystems, capable of most of above functions.

6. Engineering Design and Automation Remote sensing applications Computer analysis of remotely sensed earth-resource data has many potential applications in argiculture,forestry,geology and water resources. Explosive amount of information need to be processed in this area. NASA has ordered a Massively parallel processor (MPP) for earth satellite image processing which can computing rate of 6 billion 8-bit integer operations per second . It can almost provide real-time , time-varying scenes.

7. Energy resources explorations Seismic exploration Many oil companies are investing in the use of attached array processor or vector supercomputer for seismic data processing. One physical company in Houston has about 2 million magnetic reels of seismic data in inventory and 300,000 reels awaiting processing. The demand of cost effective computers for seismic signal processing is increasing sharply.

8. Energy resources explorations Plasma fusion power Nuclear fusion researchers are pushing to use a computer 100 times more powerful than any existing one to model plasma dynamics Synthetic nuclear fusion requires the heating of plasma to a temperature of 100 million degrees so it must be magnetically confined. The United States National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center is currently using two Cray-I and one CDC-7600 to controlled plasma experiments.

9. Energy resources explorations Nuclear reactor safety Reactor design and safety both control by computer simulations studies. These studies attempt to provide for On-line Analysis of reactor conditions Automatic Control for normal and abnormal operations Simulation of operator training Quick assessment of potential accident mitigation procedures