Entries filed under “National and Legislative Action”

News of action by countries and their legislative bodies related to HPC and supercomputing.

Exaflop Research Receives Full Funding from Senate Appropriators

By Ralph | Published September 12, 2011

An Energy Department effort to create an exascale computer will receive $126 million during the coming federal fiscal year under a Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the DOE spending bill. In a report accompanying the bill, Senate appropriators say Energy plans to deploy the first exascale system in 2018, despite challenges.

An exascale system made from today’s technology “would probably cost $100,000,000,000, require $100,000,000 a year to operate, need its own dedicated power plant to power the computing system, and be very unreliable,” the report states. A computer capable of executing an exaflop would be able to conduct one million trillion calculations per second.

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Business of HPC, Exascale, HPC | Leave a comment

Europe Launches PROSPECT Technology Platform for HPC

By Rich Brueckner | Published July 22, 2011

Clipped from: www.prospect-hpc.eu (share this clip)

 

After taking some lumps in the trade press recently, the EU is stepping up with a new initiative called PROSPECT, an open European association of leading suppliers and users of supercomputers from industry and academia. As a Technology Platform for HPC, PROSPECT’s aim is to help Europe realize the potential benefits of High Performance Computing for science and industry.

The European Technology Platform on HPC will substantially contribute to increasing European competitiveness in the development and ownership of novel and independent HPC technologies,” said Francesc Subirada, Chairman of the PROSPECT Executive board. “PROSPECT acts according to democratic principles and remains open to any organization that might want to join us in supporting European industry, science and society.”

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Patent Reform Needed for Job Creation

By Rich Brueckner | Published March 9, 2011

In this video, Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains the President’s plan to reform the patent system so that great technology ideas can be turned into the jobs. According to Goolsbee, the Patent Office now has a backlog of over 700,000 applications, with an average wait time of over three years.

I believe that these efforts are important to our nation’s ability to compete, and I would also applaud any effort to streamline the patent dispute process, which can drag on for years as well.

And as a side note, I’m wondering who on Earth writes on a white board with a seriph font?

Ed Note: Slashdot reports: “The US Senate is congratulating itself for passing a ‘landmark’ piece of patent reform legislation. Some key elements are ‘first to file’ instead of first to invent, and ending fee diversion, which means fees paid to the Patent Office will actually fund the Patent Office. Curiously, this practice has resulted in a backlog of 700,000 patent applications. The House is reportedly working on a similar bill, and soon harmony and rationality will triumph.”

Also posted in HPC | Leave a comment

When Better Code Beats Moore’s Law

By RichB | Published March 8, 2011

Steve Lohr over at the New York Times writes that performance gains from algorithm improvements often far outpace application speedups from faster processors attributable to Moore’s Law.

There are no such laws in software. But the White House advisory report cited research, including a study of progress over a 15-year span on a benchmark production-planning task. Over that time, the speed of completing the calculations improved by a factor of 43 million. Of the total, a factor of roughly 1,000 was attributable to faster processor speeds, according to the research by Martin Grotschel, a German scientist and mathematician. Yet a factor of 43,000 was due to improvements in the efficiency of software algorithms.

The Presidential Advisory PCAST report mentioned in this story ecommends investment in software as well as supercomputing hardware technologies in order to maintain U.S. competitiveness.

Also posted in HPC, HPC Software | Leave a comment

Video: President Obama on Winning the Future at Intel

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 19, 2011

On Friday I awoke to the sound of helicopters flying low over my home in Portland. Things really get shaken up around here when the President comes to town.

In this video, President Obama addresses on the importance of education to this nation’s global competitiveness:

Companies like Intel are proving that we can compete – that instead of just being a nation that buys what’s made overseas, we can make things in America and sell them around the globe.  Winning this competition depends on the ingenuity and creativity of our private sector – which was on display in my visit today.  But it’s also going to depend on what we do as a nation to make America the best place on earth to do business.

The transcript and MP3 audio from the speech are also available online.

Also posted in HPC | Leave a comment

Obama Budget Proposal Includes Exascale

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 18, 2011

Patrick Thibodeau writes that, for the first time, the 2012 budget proposal explicitly references “exascale.” If approved, the DOE will get $126 million for exascale development. The DOE budget had budgeted just over $24 million in 2011, but this was in context of “extreme scale” computing.

The DOE has not yet said how exascale funding will be used, but the supercomputing research community has active research efforts in progress. In the interim, DOE is now building 10 petaflop systems, such as the recently announced IBM system planned at Argonne National Laboratory.

Also posted in Exascale, HPC | 1 Comment

Obama FY2012 Budget Invests in Clean Energy, Freezes Salaries at National Labs

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 15, 2011

In this video, US Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu holds a media briefing on the Fiscal Year 2012 Budget proposed by President Obama. While far from passage, the budget includes a salary and bonus freeze for National Laboratory site and facility management contractor employees. The money saved will reportedly be reinvested in the Labs.

A tip of the hat goes to Chris O’Neal for pointing us to this story.

Also posted in HPC | 2 Comments

President Obama to Visit Intel Fab in Oregon

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 11, 2011

It was great to hear the President talking about supercomputing in his recent State of the Union address. He must have gotten an invite to check it out for himself up here in Portland.

Today the White House announced that President Obama will visit Intel Corporation in Hillsboro, Oregon. While there, he will tour one of the world’s largest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities with Intel CEO Paul Otellini. The President will also learn more about Intel’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education programs and Intel’s efforts to better prepare the next generation to compete for high-tech jobs and be the minds behind the next great inventions.

According to the Oregonian newspaper, the President will visit on Feb. 18, 2011.

Also posted in HPC | 1 Comment

President Obama: ORNL Nuclear Research an ‘Apollo Project’ example

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 26, 2011

In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama cited work being performed at ORNL as an example of cutting edge research aimed at solving the energy challenge.

If they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time. At the California Institute of Technology, they’re developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they’re using supercomputers to get a lot more power out of our nuclear facilities. With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”

Denovo, A Scalable HPC Transport Code for Multi-Scale Nuclear Energy Applications from NCCS on Vimeo.

In this video, ORNL’s Tom Evans discusses how the code DENOVO is being used on Jaguar for multi-scale nuclear energy applications. For more information, check out the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors.

Also posted in HPC, Video | 2 Comments

Gropp Reads HPC Between Lines of the PCAST Report

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 17, 2011

Bill Gropp from the University of Illinois looks at the recent PCAST report, which calls for “substantial and sustained” investment in a broad range of basic research for HPC. As part of the team that authored the report, Gropp calls on the community to embrace the idea that we need to rethink every aspect of high performance computing:

The list of topics, all areas in which too little is known and in which there is currently too little research, is quite sobering. Breakthroughs in only a few of these would transform computing. The NSF, DARPA, and DOE are taking the first steps to address these, but they need to be able to do more. And the community, in particular the HPC community, needs to be willing to take more risks. The past two decades have seen significant stability in HPC; even with a factor of 10,000 or more increase in scale, the programming models and many of the algorithms have only slowly changed. This is the time to rethink all aspects of computing—the hardware, the software, and the algorithms. Without a sustained investment in basic research into HPC, the historic increase in performance of HPC systems will slow down and eventually end. With such an investment, HPC will continue to provide scientists and engineers with the ability to solve the myriad of challenges that we face.

Also posted in Computing Research, Exascale, HPC | 2 Comments

Stimulus-Powered HPC: Colorado State’s New Cray XT6m

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 12, 2011

With help from federal stimulus funds from the National Science Foundation, Colorado State University is getting ready to dedicate a new Cray supercomputer that will be available to all university researchers.

As the anchor system for the Information Science and Technology Center (ISTeC), Colorado’s new Cray XT6m model features 1,248 cores, 1.6 terabytes of main memory, and 32 terabytes of disk storage. The Cray system will support much larger and more complex problems in science and engineering, especially for data intensive applications; add greater physical fidelity to existing models; facilitate application of computing to new areas of research and discovery; and support training to attract new researchers to computational science, engineering and mathematics.  Full Story

Also posted in HPC, HPC Education and Training | 1 Comment

Video: Isaac Asimov on Global Climate Change

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 9, 2011

Contrary to what you might have heard, Global Climate Change is not a new idea. Our Video Sunday feature continues with the late Isaac Asimov describing Global Warming as the biggest story in Science of 1988.

I have been talking about the greenhouse effect for 20 years at least,” says Asimov in the video. “And there are other people who have talked about it before I did. I didn’t invent it.”

The full length video of Asimov’s speech is also online.

A tip of the hat goes to Dr. Amber Jenkins NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for pointing us to this story. Her blog on climate change is very sobering, and I’m afraid that, unless more of us start paying attention, humanity won’t be around to see the wonder of Asimov’s future worlds ever come to pass.

Also posted in Green HPC, HPC, HPC People | 1 Comment

Why the Feds Fund Research

By Rich Brueckner | Published December 31, 2010

Microsoft’s Elizabeth L. Grossman reflects on passage of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act by the U.S. Congress:

One area highlighted in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act for additional research is cloud computing. The broad potential of this field is demonstrated by the current partnership between Microsoft and the National Science Foundation, through which Microsoft will provide free access to advanced cloud computing resources for select NSF-funded researchers for the next three years.

The message here is all about job creation. The enabling technologies may lie in the Cloud, but the rain dance starts in Washington, D.C..

Also posted in Cloud HPC, Computing Research | Leave a comment

PRACE Newsletter: Competitiveness and Excellence in the European HPC

By Rich Brueckner | Published December 25, 2010

The December edition of the PRACE newsletter is out with an interview with Prof. Richard Kenway, who leads the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee.

The SSC advises the PRACE Council on all scientific and technical matters. In particular, it oversees the peer review process for the allocation of PRACE resources. The most important objective of the SSC at this stage is to gain the confidence of the scientific community that PRACE resources are being allocated openly and fairly, and operated appropriately, to support the best science. That way, PRACE will attract the best science. This pursuit of scientifi cexcellence above all else will be key to our success, both to justify continued investment by the PRACE partners and to ensure Europe remains competitive in exploiting strategically vital HPC technologies.

At insideHPC, we believe that PRACE is an organization to watch. Funded by the European Union, PRACE is the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, providing member countries with world-class systems for science to strengthen the region’s scientific and industrial competitiveness.

You can subscribe to the newsletter on the PRACE homepage.

Also posted in Collaborations, Computing Research, HPC | Leave a comment

PCAST Report: Supercomputing “Arms Race” May be the Wrong Path Forward

By Rich Brueckner | Published December 22, 2010

According to this story by Steve Lohr at the New York Times, a blue-ribbon advisory group report made to the White House last week said that research funding might be better deployed elsewhere than towards an international speed race based on a machine’s performance on a particular number-calculating benchmark such as LINPACK.

In presenting the report last Thursday, David E. Shaw, chief scientist at the investment and technology firm that bears his name, and a member of the advisory group, observed that gaining the top spot on the annual ranking of supercomputers is “an arms race that is very expensive and may not be a good use of funds.”

I think it is interesting to note that the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report makes no mention of Exascale programs, which may be beyond it’s scope. It does seem to have a bone to pick with the TOP500 though:

If Top500 rankings can no longer be viewed as a definitive measure of a country’s high performance computing capabilities, what goals should our nation be setting for fundamental research in HPC systems, and what criteria should be used in allocating funding for such research? Given the natural inclination to quantify the relative performance of competitors in any race, there is a temptation to replace the traditional FLOPS-based metric with another fixed, purelytive metric (or perhaps two or three such metrics) that policymakers can use on an ongoing basis to rank America’s competitive position in HPC relative to those of other countries. This approach, however, is subject to several pitfalls that could both impair our ability to maintain our historical leadership in the field of high-performance computing and increase the level of expenditures required to even remain competitive.

First, it is no longer feasible to capture what is important about high-performance computing as a whole using one (or even a small number of ) fixed, quantitative metrics, as a result of:

  • the progressive broadening of our nation’s requirements in the area of high-performance computing;
  • the consequent “splintering” of the set of computational tasks required to satisfy these requirements;
  • a wide range of substantial advances in the various technologies available to perform such computational tasks; significant changes in the “bottlenecks” and “rate-limiting steps” that constrain many high-performance applications as a result of different rates of improvement in different technological parameters.

The rest of the 120 page report is an interesting read so far, but there is a lot to go through so I promise to follow up with some armchair analysis.

Also posted in Computing Research, Exascale, HPC, HPC Education and Training | 1 Comment

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