Five reasons U.S. is lagging in next-gen supercomputer race
In the global race to build the next generation of supercomputers, the United States’ perennial lead in this area is in danger of lagging behind such efforts in China, Japan and Europe, according to a Computerworld report that offers up five reasons “why?”
The following excerpts are courtesy of Computerworld.com:
1: The U.S. doesn't have an exascale plan.
(From Wikipedia: Exascale computing is a 21st-century attempt to move computing capabilities beyond the existing petascale. If achieved, it would represent a thousandfold increase over that scale).
An exascale development project would cost the U.S. billions. Europe has estimated that its own exascale effort will cost $3.5 billion Euros ($4.724 billion U.S.) over ten years.
China is putting untold amounts of money into its effort.
In 2008, China had 15 systems represented on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful systems. In the latest list, released this month, 74 Chinese-built systems, or 14.8% of the world's total, appeared.
In 2010, a China-built system topped the list. Japan now owns the top stop on the supercomputing list as its government shows renewed interest in high performance computing development.
The U.S. continues to fund big projects such as IBM's planned 20-petaflop computer for Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory that's due next year.
That system may put the U.S. back in first place on the Top 500 list.
But despite what's going on in Europe and China, the U.S. has yet to set a budget for exascale development.
The Department of Energy is due to deliver to Congress no later than Feb. 10 the timetable and the costs of building an exascale system. The delivery couldn't come at a worse time, particularly with this week's failure of the Congressional Super Committee to come to a budget agreement, which will trigger mandated cuts.
U.S. scientists have been warning for a year that Europe and China are on a faster exascale development path.
2: It's mistakenly assumed the U.S. will win the exascale race.
Although China's supercomputing development effort gets much attention, the Europeans are focused on developing a technology infrastructure to rival the U.S.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 16.8-mile circular tunnel on the French and Swiss borders, is establishing Europe as the world's center for high-energy physics research. This may mean that physicists who once wanted to work in the U.S. may find Europe more advantageous. That may help seed the creation of new industries in Europe.
The U.S. once had plans to build a 54-mile supercollider tunnel in Texas, but Congress pulled the funding and abandoned the partially constructed project after its projected cost increased from about $5 billion in the late 1980s to $11 billion in 1993.
European nations are also acting jointly in building their own GPS system, Galileo. It's a $20 billion project.
LHC and Galileo illustrate that European nations are willing to pool resources and work together on technology. They see a similar opportunity in exascale, especially in software development.
3: The path to exascale is uncharted, which opens the door to challengers.
Although the U.S. has not produced a plan for exascale development, it has outlined some requirements for a system. The system must be ready by 2019-2020 and can't use more than 20 MW of power, which is a small amount of power for a system that may have millions of processors.
The need for low power systems is prompting new approaches to development. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, as part of Europe's exascale initiative, is working with UK-based ARM Holdings, the smartphone chipmaker, on technology that combines its processors with Nvidia's graphics processors. They may use expected ARM co-processors as well.
Europe has other exascale developments in progress, including one using Intel technology.
4: If the U.S. doesn't lead in exascale, what happens when planning for zetascale begins?
A computer science freshman today should know in four years the pathway to an exascale system. By the time this same student completes his or her graduate work, there will be discussion about a zetascale system, something that's one thousand times more powerful.
If high performance computing maintains its historic development pattern, a zetascale system can be expected around 2030. But no one knows what a zetascale system will look like, or whether it's even possible. Zetascale computing may require entirely new approaches, such as quantum computing.
The White House says it doesn't want to be in an "arms race" in building ever faster computers, and warned in a report a year ago this month that a focus on speed "could divert resources away from basic research aimed at developing the fundamentally new approaches to HPC that could ultimately allow us to 'leapfrog' other nations."
But the U.S. is in a computing arms race whether it wants it or not. To develop technology that leapfrogs other nations, the U.S. will need sustained basic research funding as well as building an exascale system.
5: The U.S. hasn't explained what's at stake.
President Barack Obama was the first U.S. president to mention exascale computing, but he didn't really explain the potential of such systems.
Supercomputers can help scientists create models, at an atomic level, of human cells and how a virus may attack them. They can be used to model earthquakes and help find ways to predict them, as well design structures that can withstand them. They are increasingly used by industry to create products and test them in virtual environments.
Supercomputers can be used in any way imaginable, and the more power - the more compute capability - the more precise the science.
Today, the U.S. dominates the market. IBM alone accounts for nearly 45% of the system share of the Top 500 systems, followed by HP at 28%. Nearly 53% of the most powerful systems on the list are in the U.S.
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