The article by John Markoff, which appeared in the New York Times on 20th April, describing the Earth Simulator in Japan, and a similar article in HPCwire 4/26/2002, have given a seismic jolt to the complacency of US supercomputer policy makers. They have debunked the notion that there is only one path to supercomputing via off-the-shelf chips in a massively parallel configuration. To paraphrase Mark Twain "the reports of the death of parallel vector supercomputers were an exaggeration". Statements of fact that: "A Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an IBM-built machine", are hardly surprising. What is puzzling is the feigned surprise that this has happened. The Earth Simulator project started in 1997 and has been in the public domain ever since. The Japanese reported its progress in supercomputer forum worldwide. I have also reported it in this publication on several occasions over the past two years. And yet we have quotes: "the arrival of the Japanese supercomputer evokes the type of alarm raised by the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite in 1957. In some sense we have a Computenik on our hands," said Jack Dongarra, who reported the achievement. Jack maintains the authoritative list of the world's 500 fastest computers based on the LINPACK benchmark and, as a leading light in the development of MPI, is a legend in the supercomputing field. As far back as 1987 he was sufficiently well-known for a UK delegation, which I led, to visit him at the Argonne National Laboratory to discuss state-of-theart HPC issues. For those of us long in the tooth and with grey hair, this reaction is not new. In 1984 a number of articles were published in the US press stating that the Japanese have, or are just about to achieve, supremacy over the US in the manufacture of supercomputers. Raul Mendez published two articles in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics News and this triggered intense interest. Mendez's assertion that the Japanese would gain supremacy in the supercomputer field was immediately refuted by Peter Gregory then of Cray Research and Neil Lincoln then of ETA Systems, in statements reported in High Technology. They both exuded confidence that the US would keep its substantial lead. At the same time they used this assertion as leverage to extract a deluge of new funds from the Department of Defence for research in new supercomputers. One has to remember that in the early eighties the US academic community swallowed the concept that small systems (DEC-VAX systems) were more cost effective and user-friendly. This led them into a desert. They then realised that whatever the merits of small systems they were not able to do real science on them. The lack of exposure of their new graduates to the "big ideas" made them less suitable to industry and their competitive edge started to wane vis-a-vis Japan and Western Europe. The Lax report in 1984 articulated with clarity the damaging economic consequences of neglecting supercomputing. The decision to set up initially 5 National Science Foundation (NSF) supercomputer centres was swiftly implemented. After that supercomputer centres and resources grew rapidly. As early as 1990, these lessons were forgotten and the proponents of microprocessor-based off-the-shelf Massively Parallel Processors (MPPs) and clusters were on the ascendance, raising doubts about vector processors' survival. "Wither vector and Fortran!" they shouted. Some, in the guise of the US ASCI programme, made decisions that almost destroyed Cray Research, the main vector processor provider in the USA. There were also other factors in Cray's difficulties, not least its dependence on users from the weapons industry, which declined after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Cheap off-the-shelf processors have their attraction. Funding bodies like them because they often give the illusion of cheap capability computing. In reality, insufficient memory bandwidth and slow inter-connect switches intercede and deliver a mirage. For example, when Intel released the iPSC/2 in the late eighties, offering a 60Mflop/s processor for $64,000, there was much excitement and a prediction that the Cray, the workhorse of scientific computing at that time, would become obsolete overnight. In reality the iPSC/2 could only deliver around 2Mflop/s sustained, about the same as the Control Data CDC 6600 twenty-five years earlier, and was no match for the Cray Y-MP for large-scale computation. The added difficulty of parallel programming in the late eighties hammered the last nail in iPSC/2's commercial coffin. By the mid-nineties the new breed of computers made from off-the-shelf commodity chips arrived on the market. Those funded from the US ASCI programme and consisting of several thousand CPUs grabbed the headlines, but because of communication and memory bandwidth limitations, they often deliver very little of their potential peak performance to the user. As one US Earth Systems scientist told me in May 2000: "In the USA it was as if we were entering a Grand Prix, and some of us said: don't give us all that money for the best car, just pay us less and we will buy a commodity off-the-shelf General Motors car and soup it up. Of course we lost". Several universities and government agencies have tried to buy NEC machines over the last decade for purposes like aircraft simulation, seismic studies and molecular modelling. But resistance from the Commerce Department and members of Congress, who complained that NEC was "dumping" the machines or selling them below cost, thwarted these sales. This infamous protectionist posture taken by the US government against Japanese vendors with viable vector parallel systems and the near collapse of Cray Inc., sent shivers to aircraft companies with a substantial stake in weapons production, who had previously been using Cray vector supercomputers. The concerns from this important section of industry sparked a debate in Washington. This debate is now over. It was resolved that there is a need for high bandwidth systems and money has been made available for Cray Inc. to develop the SV2 and successor products. NEC sells the SX-6 a scaled-down version of the Earth Simulator supercomputer. Last year Cray Inc. entered into a marketing agreement to sell these machines in the United States, but no sales have been announced to date. The US policy of favouring scalar MPPs in the 1990s gave a great fillip to vendors with microprocessor- based systems inside its protected home market, but elsewhere by year 2000 the aerospace and weather/climate sectors were dominated by NEC. Teraflop/s, for example, are essential for realistic simulation of global climate changes. Today's weather models are too crude, too large-grained. To extend models to include the earth's hydrology (underground water reservoirs as well as cloud) computers require teraflop/s power. As far back as 1990, supercomputer model simulations were exemplified by studies on smog in cities such as Hamburg, London and the Los Angeles basin. This last was used to develop a cost-effective technical basis for key revisions of the US Clean Air Act. The annual cost of environmental control projects exceeds $100 billion and a modest cost reduction pays for many supercomputers. A few days ago I had an email from the Earth Simulator Centre in Yokohama informing me how they are putting their 35.6Teraflop/s to good use. Several projects are up and running. As some of you know the Earth Simulator was developed to study two important areas. One area is atmospheric and oceanographic science: prediction of long-term climate change (global warming), middle/short-term climate change (EL Nino), and weather disasters (typhoons). The other area is solid earth science: evolution of solid earth (earth core, mantle and crust), evolution of crust and mantle near Japan, evolution of earthquake generation processes (seismic wave tomography) and so on. They are very keen to have international collaborators from the US and Europe especially on climate change. As I understand it for prediction of typhoons they are already negotiating collaboration with the Meteorological Agency of Canada and the university of Taiwan. As we have seen from the Earth Simulator the key to Teraflop/s sustained performance is fast CPUs, fast memories and fast interconnect switches. The (type C), tightly coupled parallel vector supercomputer architectures from Cray and NEC have the edge by a large margin over (type T) microprocessorbased systems at present. As Burton Smith from Cray Inc. said on many occasions: "each system type is adapted to its ecological niche; Type T systems perform well with local data, well-balanced workload, explicit methods and domain decomposition. Type C systems (represented by NEC and Cray) perform well with global access of data, poorly balanced workloads, sparse linear algebra, implicit methods, and adaptive or irregular meshes". At present these two types of supercomputers are capable to be massively parallel, as the ASCI White and the Earth Simulator have demonstrated. The issue is how to put dogma aside, pursue architectural diversity to produce capability computers suitable in their selected niche. Remember 200 light aircraft maybe cheaper but are not equivalent to a Boeing 747 for traversing the Atlantic. Although the supercomputer market is relatively small, about $5Billion a year, it is overlaid with strategic importance spanning technological and scientific advances as well as national security imperatives. In many ways the politics overwhelm the rationale, with vendors bending politicians' ears with unhealthy consequences. On the same day as the New York Times article was written, Friday April 19, the NSF Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyber-infrastructure was meeting at the University of Michigan to present their draft report on the next phase of the Terascale programme. Instructively the only member on the panel from outside education was from IBM Research. He gave a presentation on what has changed in computing. The meeting proposed a new initiative to revolutionize science and engineering research, at NSF and worldwide, and to capitalize on new computing and communications opportunities. 21st Century Cyber-infrastructure would include supercomputing, but also massive storage, networking, software, collaboration, visualization and human resources. They foresee that current centers (NCSA, SDSC, PSC) are a key resource for the initiative. The budget estimate is incremental $650 Million/year (continuing), although some perceive the requested funds as rather low. Hopefully, NSF will have the courage to grasp the opportunity to pursue architectural diversity and propose that a healthy chunk of the funds are used to procure parallel vector systems. To paraphrase Queen Elizabeth speaking earlier this week to both houses of parliament in the UK, on the occasion of celebrating her 50th year on the throne: "Change has become constant in our lives, the way it is managed and how we embrace it will determine the future".4 responses total.
I'm not sure what Markoff is getting at. Simulating the Earth *is* one of those easily-parallelizable problems that Beowulf clusters are so good at. It's problems like Fourier transforms and such that require access to all of the data at once, which is why it's so hard to compute holograms. Given this, I get the feeling that the article is planted to try to push policymakers to support some program or option for a purpose that Markoff (or the person he's working for) wishes to remain unstated. That would explain the apparent inconsistencies.
John Markoff sucks. Free Kevin.
japanese are too powerful... earth simulator is a very poewrful machine but i think that is not possible to calculate all... math is not life. in my opinion japan are going to decript all net passwords fot conquer the world. hehehe crazy? whild? simply the truth... hehehe italy forever nydus
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