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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."
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*).
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.
One big reason why an exa-scale installation is generally better than an exa-scale distributed project is that of Data Transfer.
Distributed computing is plagued by Data Transfer bottlenecks. If it's an internet project, the cumulative effect of combined bandwidth does add up. But serving out project segments at exa-scale levels is very expensive, and equally expensive receiving the solution chunks. There's also the problem of "internet climatology" (I'm not sure what it's really called) where the connections aren't uniform. While the internet does "self-heal" it takes time, and that adds up as well.
Basically, when you scale up the computing power on a distributed project, the problems scale too. Out of order processing of problem chunks also causes problems when peers join and drop out in unpredictable ways. Often the same chunk has to spend many times more cycles than actually required, due to peers getting bored with the work, or just testing out the system and dropping the piece they're working on.
An exa-scale supercomputer would remove the problem of collaboration overhead, or at least significantly reduce it. Scheduling is much more efficient, and in the end FLOPS doesn't measure performance in any reliable qualitative way. A distributed project can run at an exaFLOPS rate and still do no productive work, if the participants never finish any of the work they are tasked with.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Try not to forget that most of Europe was rubble in 1945. A good portion of the second half of the 20th century was spent building houses and infrastructure that had been obliterated by American, German, and Soviet bombs. It's only natural that they had to play catch-up in many aspects of technology. That has come to an end now, with Europe at or exceeding American levels in most areas of research & technology.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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?
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
seems to work well for seti@home.
surely the expense of exascale couldn't be justified merely because of a data transfer limitation for clustering and boinc.
boinc is enjoying organic growth in performance, including in data transfer rates, with upgrading of consumer hardware and telco infrastructure, and scientific organisations can access this power at a fraction of the cost of establishing a supercomputing facility.
the other bottleneck is I/O, and this will not change with exascale. sensors can only generate data so fast. the massive amounts of data that might require exa-scale are likely generated from multiple sensors, which lends itself to parallel processing anyway, and packaging data for boinc processing is a much simpler problem for one computer than trying to perform the entire process. there is also no reason why boinc hosts couldn't perform some of the data management work as well as crunching results. while not boinc, google is a good example of distributed data management
i can only imagine that whatever monstrosities come out of these efforts will sit idle for much of their time waiting for data to process like just every other computer on the planet.
the whole think stinks of political dickwaving, but I guess that shouldn't be unexpected
Some examples of wasteful, government-enforced research: man in space, GPS, the Internet.
most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones
Boeing was actually a partner in the A380 project at one point, but it bailed and started the Dreamliner. I bet they're still sulking about that decision.
The only project Europe can be commended on is ITER
the only other thing they contributed to was maybe was European settlement of the west (what is now the United States), but that doesn't really matter I guess; I’m sure the native Indian population would have eventually established NASA, NIF, etc anyway
Let's go through your examples: .. a weak form of NASA"
"NASA went to space, so Europe made the ESA
Ok, the ESA has got nothing on NASA (no surprise since its total funding it sadly only about 1/5th what NASA gets). But the only reason NASA was able to get to the moon so quickly back in the day was that it 'stole' German rocket technology and scientists after the war. Everything NASA's done since then has been based on developments on the rocket technology it got from Germany after the war.
"The US starting building the supercollider (which Reagan cancelled) so they built the LHC -- a weaker supercollider ... they only win cause supercollider funding got cut"
Nonsense, the LHC is a machine that is literally *the edge* of what current science and technology can do, which is why it's taken so long to get it working. You can't compare that to a collider that was cancelled 20 years ago due to being unrealisticly expensive to build.
"The US has Boeing so Europee made Airbus -- most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones"
Airbus pioneered the use technologies like fly-by-wire and composite fuselages long before Boeing dared. They've also introduced new aircraft that change the economics on certain routes such as the A380. Not to mention that the first commercial jetliner in production was the deHavilland Comet from the UK, although it proved unsafe and was eventually overtaken by the American 707.
"The US built the National Ignition Facility to study nuclear fusion, so Europe is building Laser Megajoule"
The NIF and ITER are two different approaches to achieving viable nuclear fusion, Europe has commited the majority of its funding to the ITER approach but it'd be stupid not to have some smaller scale experiments which use the approach that NIF uses. Just as I'm sure the US has some experiments that try the ITER torus approach.
Oh and BTW the National Ignition Facility was 5 years behind schedule and almost 4 times more expensive than originally budgeted when completed.
There are areas of scient and technology where the US is ahead and some where Europe is, but it's always annoying in those discussions to have some jingoistic American spread around the myth that all technological development comes from the US and Europe (and everyone else) are just copiers. It's a myth not supported by history, including not by recent history.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
NASA went to space...
... using the expertise of a bunch of German rocket scientists.
The US has Boeing...
... thanks to the jet engine, invented by a Brit.
America's special talent seems to be taking inventions from others and making them fit for mass consumption(*). But I'm not so sure they're the great innovators you claim they are.
(*) A trend that was curiously reversed with the Internet and the World Wide Web.
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 applications on big supercomputers are simulations. In the basic case, each node sits there simulating it's cube of atmosphere, or its bit of the airflow around an aircraft or car design or its bit of a nuclear weapon in a simulated warehouse fire. Every time-step it needs to exchange the state of the borders of it's region with its neighbour nodes. In some other applications, all the nodes are working together to invert a huge matrix or do a massive Fourier transform in several dimensions. These need even more communication.
The demand is genuine, and can't be met by wide-area distributed computing using any algorithms we know.
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...).
Why is everyone pushing for exascale computing?
Well, we all want more computing power.
What is such a super computer used for?
Soliving very large systems of linear equations (for one). Many (but by no means all) scientific problems come down on the inside to solving linear systems over and over again. Basically, anything that can be described by partial differential equations.
Sometimes people want to find eigen decompositions of them too.
But there's also things like molecular dynamics, etc, etc.
Couldn't a massive distributed system work just as well?
Yes: that's exactly what supercomputers are these days. They're usually a collection of decent to very good CPUs (BlueGene series aside) in a bunch of 4p rack mount boxes with a top-end network.
The key generally in the network, which allows micorsecond latency communication between neighbouring nodes.
The nature of exactly what networking works well is very dependent on the problem.
SJW n. One who posts facts.