White House Warns of Supercomputer Arms Race

dcblogs writes "The White House's science advisors, in a report last week, said a petaflop-by-petaflop race to achieve number one on the Top500 could prove costly and divert money from supercomputing research. 'While it would be imprudent to allow ourselves to fall significantly behind our peers with respect to scientific performance benchmarks that have demonstrable practical significance, a single-minded focus on maintaining clear superiority in terms of flops count is probably not in our national interest,' the report said (PDF). It is urging the supercomputing community to expand its benchmark measures beyond the Top500's Linpack. It says the Graph500, for data-intensive applications involving the rapid execution of graph operations, 'will be more relevant,' but also acknowledges that it will difficult to rely on any one measure."

Comments

This is how a superpower dies

[mewsenews]

If another country starts to outshine you, try changing the rules.

America's strength used lie in an immense manufacturing culture, and that's given way to "intellectual property". Instead of dealing with tangibles, America is content to sit behind a desk and let the Chinese labour.

Re:This is how a superpower dies

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It's creating more fear of the outside World: terrorism, other countries "attacking" us, others getting "ahead" of us, an infinitum.

Nuclear war and the Soviets are gone. Our leaders need other bogeymen - their version of "Goldstein" - to keep us in fear. Because those of us who have been educated outside of the corporate system - any type of education that doesn't train one for a vocation - fear is how you control the little people. Apparently the scare of terrorists and Muslims aren't enough.

True to an extent

[GigsVT]

If you really need to crunch a lot of numbers and are willing to spend a lot to do it, it often makes more sense to develop an ASIC or FPGA type solution. I know the EFF put together a key cracking system for $250,000 that would probably still blow modern supercomputers out of the water for that specific application.

It's not the supercomputer, it's the software

[pclminion]

The "race" is not about the hardware. All modern supercomputers are massively clustered, using various shared memory architectures. The technology is commodity level, and even a small sum like $10 million can buy a SHITLOAD of hardware. The challenge, and the point of competition, is the creation of software technologies and algorithms to effectively make use of clustered hardware. It's a question of who has the best minds working on the software. The hardware is a given. People have constructed impressive massively parallel processors using game consoles, after all.

It's the programmers, not the supercomputer makers, who will make the difference in this "race."

How a Superpower Rules

[Doc Ruby]

The advice to the president doesn't change rules for "fastest supercomputer". It tells the president not to be suckered into a supercomputer race measured on only the FLOPS, but rather on more useful performance measures. Because getting sidetracked into less useful metrics to see who's winning the race will waste US resources in winning the race, but not producing the most useful computer. And the US interest is in producing the most useful computer, not in nominally winning the race.

In fact, that report says "let China dominate the Top500, if the US still has the better computers". Which is exactly what I want the US doing, and what I prefer China to be doing rather than leaving the US behind in actual usefulness.

But if you want to get caught up in "the USA is dead" trip that leads into traps that actually would hurt the US if acted on, go ahead. You're not having any effect on the US supercomputer effort.