system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5: Why does research take so much computing power?

I always hear about scientific research needing crazy amounts of computing power but I have no idea why. As someone with an interest in hardware, I’ve always been intrigued by this.
gpt
A lot of of problems that come up in science are not solvable by straightforward algebraic methods. Things like protein folding, fluid dynamics, stress/strain, gravity/orbits with multiple bodies etc end up with fairly complex differential equations. In the past, the only method was do make a lot of simplifying assumptions in order to make the problems tractable. As computers develop, there needs to be fewer assumptions and the computer could do a lot more grunt work calculations to get more accurate answers. But there are still classes of problems that are best approached using simulation. These generally require stepping forward in small increments (usually time) and solve the state of the problem, then step forward in time and use the end result of the previous stage to calculate the current state. 

This requires huge amounts of computing power if the time steps are small and if the systems for each state are complicated (say modelling movement of all the stars in the entire Milky Way or weather patterns). 

Then there are classes of problems requiring optimization - for example complicated molecules like proteins can be "folded" in many ways (think in terms of trillions and billions of ways) There is no way to predict what "works" so each configuration has to be simulated separately and tested.

Then there are just the complicated observations (say astronomy) and experiments (say the LHC) which generate terabytes and petabytes of data. It would take thousands of years for a person to analyze the data by hand to extract meaningful data and patterns that might be useful. 

Some of the examples in research that take advantage of computing power.