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."

Comments

Definition of Exascale Computing

[toygeek]

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)

Re:Help Me Understand?

[ldobehardcore]

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.

Re:The problem with Europe is they are duplicators

[jpapon]

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.

Welcome to 3rd World America

[Required Snark]

The USA is well on it's way to 3rd world status. We will fall behind because we are not funding fundamental research.

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.

Re:Welcome to 3rd World America

[argStyopa]

Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".

Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.

First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism. I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity. We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.

Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.

In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA. The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.

Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.

In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million. US fatalities were approximately 500,000. Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.

The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination. US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland. (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.) But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere. Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.

For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.

In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy. Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant. Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism. Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for

Bullshit doomism

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:More waste

[peppepz]

Some examples of wasteful, government-enforced research: man in space, GPS, the Internet.

Re:The problem with Europe is they are duplicators

[timbo234]

Let's go through your examples:
"NASA went to space, so Europe made the ESA .. a weak form of NASA"
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.