HPC from a self-organisation perspective: The case of crowd steering at the urban scale

HPC normally refers to the aggregation of computational capabilities in such a way that intense computations can be executed in a much shorter time than it would require on a classic end-user machine. In this paper, we propose a different point of view on such matter: focussing on situated self-organising systems, i.e. systems in which myriads of nodes deployed in a physical environment locally cooperate in order to obtain a global coherent and robust behaviour. We show how the intrinsic need of contextual information pushes towards distribution of the computation among such nodes, resembling a sort of high-performance computing system at a urban scale. We exemplify this concept by discussing an experience on designing and simulating a crowd steering application, able to provide users walking directions considering the contingencies, in this case overcrowded areas.