One thing that is interesting to me is John’s and Dan’s comments about how HPC technology has fallen on hard times because of the lack of leadership. One thing I find interesting in these comments is that if we take a capitalist approach, then economic demand would drive development of ever faster machines. But since we’re not seeing new technology for faster performance, except perhaps the development of accelerators, one could make the observation that the economy isn’t asking for new technology. While I don’t consider myself a right-wing capitalist, I have seen competition and the market drive some very interesting technologies and we haven’t seen “it” driving any new high-end technologies. While I’m not prepared to say that this means the world is happy with what we have, I do think it is an interesting data point that the economy and world market are seemingly not asking for exascale systems (or even petascale).

Alternatively, we do have certain government agencies asking for more and more computational ability and rightly so. And as John and Dan both point out, the government has not taken a lead on developing on developing hardware to get to the level of needed performance. But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. Let’s suppose the government did take a commanding lead that is better funded and better coordinated, ultimately funding companies to do research and development into new technologies for faster performance. One of the possible problems I see with this approach is that only a very few companies would be able to do this R&D and arguably we would be down to maybe 2 companies in this field. The systems would be, presumably, very expensive, and the companies would have to charge government customers a great deal of $$ for the systems. Would the government be willing to invest R&D dollars into new systems and then turn around and pay lots of money for them? I think that government customers (and funding agencies) have gotten used to the low price/performance ratios that clusters and open-source have brought to the table and would not be willing to pay the high prices and would buy fewer systems, driving up the price. All of a sudden, bingo, we are in the viscous death spiral of expensive government funded programs. The only way out of this is to either produce a true revolution in price/performance with new technology or have the government customers commit to buying a number of large of these systems.

Before anyone jumps down my throat and says that I don’t understand the market or the need for exascale ssytems, etc., let me just say that I’m not advocating government funding and I’m not advocating letting the market drive development. I’m just observing what is happening and trying to make sense of things. While I think some government funded development is fine at any point in time (and I worked in the aerospace industry which lives on government funding), I also think that it is a good idea to see what the market is “telling” you in general. I’ve seen the argument a million times, that government investment into very cutting-edge risky technology will works its way into mainstream consumer products, personally, I don’t see too much of this lately, particularly in HPC at this time.

I don’t know about government investing into cutting edge HPC technologies. Part of me says, yes, it’s a great thing and should be pursued with vigor and part of me thinks that the market does a pretty good job of pushing technology in the direction that people need. I guess I’m saying that a combination is perhaps the best solution, but I don’t know what the ratio should be.

Anyway, some early morning thoughts.

Jeff