Comments on: The rich secrets in HPC, and the damage they do http://insidehpc.com/2009/07/09/the-rich-secrets-in-hpc-and-the-damage-they-do/ HPC news for supercomputing professionals Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:32:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 By: Brian Bonenfant http://insidehpc.com/2009/07/09/the-rich-secrets-in-hpc-and-the-damage-they-do/comment-page-1/#comment-173035 Brian Bonenfant Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:14:42 +0000 http://insidehpc.com/?p=6112#comment-173035 A very interesting blog post. I agree with the general principle that secrecy can, on occasion, be used for evil as well as for good. And the three examples given were monumentally costly for our country and our grand kids will likely still be feeling the consequences of them. That said, however, I think the mixing of the notion of public vs private and the different development languages used is confusing and somewhat diminishes that power of the argument. In reality an HPC code can be open or secret no matter the language that it is written in. Most of the open science codes are developed in C and FORTRAN but they are still open. Furthermore, while I'm no expert on the software development practices of the NSA or the Finance Industry, my guess is that they are direct beneficiaries of the HPC development that is done in the open science community. It produces the pool of people from which they can hire. The research done also produces the methods and techniques they can leverage for their own proprietary purposes, etc. By definition, true HPC is a leading edge industry. Therefore, there will always be a healthy level of secrecy surrounding it. Leading edge technology is a source of competitive advantage and there will always be a demand for competitive advantage whether it be in business or in government. What is needed is for there to be adequate but not onerous oversight to avoid the kind of major catastrophes that we are now living through. As our industry matures however, the term HPC is becoming known more and more of an infrastructure technology that is common in a growing number of agencies and businesses. The challenge will be to see the difference between what is leading edge and what is common infrastructure. My guess is that the essence of that difference may lie in large part with the software developed for the more commonly available architecture. A very interesting blog post. I agree with the general principle that secrecy can, on occasion, be used for evil as well as for good. And the three examples given were monumentally costly for our country and our grand kids will likely still be feeling the consequences of them.

That said, however, I think the mixing of the notion of public vs private and the different development languages used is confusing and somewhat diminishes that power of the argument. In reality an HPC code can be open or secret no matter the language that it is written in. Most of the open science codes are developed in C and FORTRAN but they are still open.

Furthermore, while I’m no expert on the software development practices of the NSA or the Finance Industry, my guess is that they are direct beneficiaries of the HPC development that is done in the open science community. It produces the pool of people from which they can hire. The research done also produces the methods and techniques they can leverage for their own proprietary purposes, etc.

By definition, true HPC is a leading edge industry. Therefore, there will always be a healthy level of secrecy surrounding it. Leading edge technology is a source of competitive advantage and there will always be a demand for competitive advantage whether it be in business or in government. What is needed is for there to be adequate but not onerous oversight to avoid the kind of major catastrophes that we are now living through.

As our industry matures however, the term HPC is becoming known more and more of an infrastructure technology that is common in a growing number of agencies and businesses. The challenge will be to see the difference between what is leading edge and what is common infrastructure. My guess is that the essence of that difference may lie in large part with the software developed for the more commonly available architecture.

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