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Europe Plans Exascale Funding Above U.S. Levels
dcblogs writes "The European Commission last week said it is doubling its multi-year investment in the push for exascale computing from €630 million to €1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion). They are making this a priority even as austerity measures are imposed to prevent defaults. China, meanwhile, has a five-year plan to deliver exascale computing between 2016-20 (PDF). The Europeans announced the plan the same week the White House released its fiscal year 2013 budget, which envisions a third year of anemic funding to develop exascale technologies. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy science budget asked for nearly $91 million in funding for the efforts in the current fiscal year; it received $73.4 million. DOE science is trying for about $90 million for exascale for 2013. There's more funding tucked in military and security budgets. The U.S. wants exascale around 2018, but it has yet to deliver a plan or the money for it."
Have to buy off his "people". He can't afford to create jobs or anything like that.
Who knows any kind of toys they have barred in the NSA, and DoD. And given the amount of money that flies through defense contracts wouldn't be hard to hide that in a small line item somewhere(likely next to that Wayne Tech justice league space station *wink*).
go Europe, beat those ugly Americans
Why is everyone pushing for exascale computing? What is such a super computer used for? Couldn't a massive distributed system work just as well?
€1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion)
Or, in a few years, about as much as 3 goats and 5 ducks - or almost anything of value.
Such government "grand" plans are good to distract the crowds, entertain the peons, and prop politicians and their friend's pet projects and corporations up. But the fact that such project requires forcing people to "invest" in them is proof that these resources are misaligned to the current needs and preferences of the people.
I'm sure that we'll get to exascale at some point, but trying to push it too early (before investors find ways to fund it voluntarily) means wasted opportunities. Unfortunately, as Bastiat pointed out, such project yields easily seen results whereas the opportunity cost tends to be ignore, as it is difficult to know. Don't forget this unseen cost.
I didn't know what it was, I don't follow supercomputing very closely. I looked it up. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exascale_computing
"Exascale computing refers to computing capabilities beyond the currently existing petascale. If achieved, it would represent a thousandfold increase over that scale."
To define Petascale:
"In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petascale
A Petascale computer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar can do 1.75 petaflops. To reach an exaflop, it would require almost 6000 installations of this supercomputer.
So yeah, Exaflop is pretty big. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(computing)
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
The US is awash in privately funded technology R&D toward exascale computing. While there is government funding, it is somewhat superfluous to the extent that US has a huge, well-funded private sector obsessed with massively scaling just about everything vaguely related to computing. That whole Internet-scale computing thing.
The US is hardly disadvantaged by the government not spending money on exascale computing. The US government does not need to compensate for the absence of private investment.
for example: .. a weak form of NASA ... they only win cause supercollider funding got cut .. Now as it turns out NIF is having trouble achieving ignition, due to the type of lasers used .. however Europe already started building Laser Megajoule .. and is still building it similar to the NIF .. at least they should have tried to innovate and use a different type of laser such as DPSSL or Krypton Flouride .. that way there is no duplication of effort and they could have made a genuine contribution.
NASA went to space, so Europe made the ESA
The US starting building the supercollider (which Reagan cancelled) so they built the LHC -- a weaker supercollider
The US has Boeing so Europee made Airbus -- most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones
The US built the National Ignition Facility to study nuclear fusion, so Europe is building Laser Megajoule
The only project Europe can be commended on is ITER .. which will take another 8 years to build and whose funding is constantly on the brink of cutoff.
We have no ability to put humans in space.
We no longer host any major sub-atomic research facility. The generation after the CERN will not be in the US. We're not even in the running.
The next big ground based radio telescope will not be in the US.
The NASA planetary exploration budget is being diverted to fund private launch companies. If there was a viable economic model for space transport, then private sector equity funding would be available. It's not. Many of the commercial space ventures are funded by individuals who made fortunes in software (Musk, Carmac, Bezos, Allen. Branson, but in music and transportation), Wall Street is not betting on making money in the launch sector. Putting NASA money into launch ventures is not basic science R&D.
We are, however teaching creationism and climate change denial in schools. Most of the Republican presidential candidates are anti-evolution. Santorum just said that he is "pro-science", and the Democrats are anti-science. This is clearly in 1984 territory: Ignorance Is Strength.
Most Slashdot readers will experience the slide into 3rd world status during the course of their lives.
Why is Snark Required?
Did anybody else first interpret the headline as commentary on the national debt?
I'll just address one point:
We have no ability to put humans in space.
Temporarily, because we have MULTIPLE private companies working to that end. In just a few years we'll have multiple private companies that can put way more people in space than any government ever has, a far superior situation to be in.
Do not mistake transition for defeat.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm currently funding this with what I do at work. This for once, is a great example of what the govt shouldn't do.
As a mechanical engineer with only a hobbyist interest in IT, my first assumption was exameters -- and as an exameter is 100 light years, or approximately the Milky Way's thickness, it seems we should at least get megascale tech working before spending billions on exascale.
From the article:
"As for China, 'the Chinese are very practical in this regard,' said Joseph. 'They are very interested in how they use their machines to make their industries stronger.'"
LOL
This fits my picture of Europe, US and Japan calculating wheather, eartquakes and nuclear explosions, while the Chinese let their industry sector use it to improve their products.
I assume a "+1 funny" as otherwise I'd have to assume that you're oblivious to the numerous scientific contributions for which Europeans have received recognitions like the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal. You've got a point though: research around the globe is tightly coupled and so the funded projects resemble each other. You could add Japan to the mix. Their K computer isn't just a copy of some IBM BlueGene or such. And it's currently the fastest machine, at least until BlueGene/Q results are in.
Europe on the other hand doesn't have a serious computer hardware industry. The only chip manufacturers left (e.g. IBM, AMD, Nvidia, Fujitsu etc.) are all non-european. For a layman, this may make it kind of hard to imagine what Europe would spend its funding on, if they can't build the hardware themselves. Well, it turns out that software is a major part of exascale computing because at that scale effects (e.g. reliability of the hardware, scalability of IO) play a major role, but didn't hurt as much on the Petaflop machines. Now, when you turn your face to the software aspect, then you will see that a sizeable part of the papers published at the relevant conferences (e.g. http://sc11.supercomputing.org/ ) are European, and in many aspects they set the benchmark in terms of scalability and performance.
That said, it's hard to find a purely European or US project nowadays as many research institutions collaborate
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Most of the really competent scientist in the US are foreign-born and have always been.
As for copying it has been a give and take for the few decades the US has had any intellectuals at all.
How many pre-Franklin intellectuals can you recall? Where were they born?
does all this funding come from? oh, that's right, the euro-weenies' high taxes
Resolving the turbulent flow around an airfoil with a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS, i.e., without a turbulent model) requires an exascale computer in order to be practical (i.e. only take some weeks).
At the moment there is a whole science of creating turbulence models for approximating turbulence behavior. However, because turbulence is one of the most important unresolved problems of classical mechanics, none of the models work in all cases, and in some cases, none work.
We are still far from having "exascale on the desktop" but some practical DNS simulations will give a lot of insight into turbulence, allowing us to develop better turbulence models with the corresponding improvements in energy efficiency (e.g. aerodynamics, combustion, lubrication,... for applications in combustion engines, wind turbines, cars, trains, ships, airplanes, weather forecasting...).
They'll be running Windows.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The is GPU based computing but if your problem fits that paradigm then your're set: http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/11/exascale-an-innovator%E2%80%99s-dilemma (No I don't work for nvidia)