insideHPC » National and Legislative Action

NSF to Lead Federal Efforts In Big Data

Ralph — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:44:29 +0000

Clipped from: www.nsf.gov (share this clip)

At a White House event yesterday, NSF Director Subra Suresh announced a new Big Data solicitation including a $10 million Expeditions in Computing award and awards in cyberinfrastructure, geosciences, and training.

Data are motivating a profound transformation in the culture and conduct of scientific research in every field of science and engineering,” Suresh said. “American scientists must rise to the challenges and seize the opportunities afforded by this new, data-driven revolution. The work we do today will lay the groundwork for new enterprises and fortify the foundations for U.S. competitiveness for decades to come.”

NSF released a solicitation, “Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering,” or “Big Data,” jointly with NIH. This program aims to extract and use knowledge from collections of large data sets in order to accelerate progress in science and engineering research. Specifically, it will fund research to develop and evaluate new algorithms, statistical methods, technologies, and tools for improved data collection and management, data analytics and e-science collaboration environments.

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Exaflop Research Receives Full Funding from Senate Appropriators

Ralph — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:25:38 +0000

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.

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Europe Launches PROSPECT Technology Platform for HPC

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:01:28 +0000

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.

Video: Patent Reform Needed for Job Creation

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 09:38:31 +0000

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.”

When Better Code Beats Moore’s Law

RichB — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:52:36 +0000

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.

Video: President Obama on Winning the Future at Intel

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 19:05:52 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Muco-mnC3g

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.

Obama Budget Proposal Includes Exascale

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:03:57 +0000

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.

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

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:59:43 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfL57T8ZGfc

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.

President Obama to Visit Intel Fab in Oregon

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:14:54 +0000

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.

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

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:28:38 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFsGa_bb21o

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.

Gropp Reads HPC Between Lines of the PCAST Report

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:00:06 +0000

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.

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

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:08:34 +0000

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

Video: Isaac Asimov on Global Climate Change

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:56:53 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6tSYRY90PA

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.

Why the Feds Fund Research

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:18:01 +0000

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..

PRACE Newsletter: Competitiveness and Excellence in the European HPC

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 16:11:30 +0000

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.

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

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:26:48 +0000

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.

COMPETES Act Passes Congress: Good News for HPC

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:20:32 +0000

This week the U.S. Congress passed bipartisan legislation to create jobs and maintain America’s economic leadership by increasing investment in science education, advanced research, and manufacturing innovation. It is expected that the President will sign the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act into law.

Recent months have brought further confirmation that America is at risk of losing its competitive edge,” said Congressman Dan Lipinski, a former professor and one of the few members of Congress trained as an engineer. “New international test results show American students continue to lag behind their overseas peers, and a follow-up to the influential Rising Above the Gathering Storm report showed other countries continue to catch up and threaten to overtake the U.S. in key measures of innovation. The investments the COMPETES reauthorization makes in American innovation are critical to reversing this trend and putting our country on a path to job creation and long-term economic growth. I am also pleased that, as I fought for over many months, the bill takes numerous steps to promote manufacturing innovation, including through the adoption of ideas from my National Manufacturing Strategy Act.”

UT System Approves $23 Million for Shared Storage at Texas Universities

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:11:25 +0000

Everthing is getting bigger in Texas. The University of Texas System Board of Regents has unanimously approved $23 million for improvements that will increase connectivity and computer capacity for all 15 University of Texas institutions, support research projects, and foster stronger collaborations among scientists in Texas and around the world.

Discoveries at the leading-edge of science require increasingly powerful computational technologies and are increasingly collaborative,” said TACC Director Jay Boisseau. ”This project will greatly enhance the ability of researchers at UT System institutions to address the most challenging computational problems, and to work together to make breakthrough discoveries.”

The improvements will allow institutions to conduct projects using shared data storage. This will enable researchers from different sites to access a single data source, aiding collaboration. A UT Data Repository prototype will be developed to provide disk storage and data collection management software for open science and clinical research data.

NSF Announces New HPC Solicitation for Sustained Petascale Supers

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:09:32 +0000

The National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure has issued a new HPC solicitation for sustained petascale supercomputers. Proposals are due March 7, 2011.

With this solicitation, the NSF requests proposals from organizations willing to serve as HPC Resource Providers within Extreme Digital (XD), the successor to TeraGrid, and who propose to acquire and deploy new, innovative petascale HPC systems and services. Competitive HPC systems will: expand the range of data intensive computationally-challenging science and engineering applications that can be tackled with XD HPC services and efficiently provide a high degree of stability and usability by January, 2013.

Video: SC10 Opening Press Briefing Looks at HPC Market

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:39:59 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI6jR3gdnJM

In this video, Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, provides an overview of the HPC Market.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSx23uYhgNo

In part two of this video, Earl Joseph from IDC provides an overview of the HPC Market and IDC’s recent report: Strategic Agenda for European Leadership in Supercomputing — HPC 2020. Recorded Nov. 15, 2010 at the SC10 conference in New Orleans, LA.