Warning At SC13 That Supercomputing Will Plateau Without a Disruptive Technology

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Warning At SC13 That Supercomputing Will Plateau Without a Disruptive Technology

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @05:40AM from the series-of-nanotubes dept.

dcblogs writes "At this year's supercomputing conference, SC13, there is worry that supercomputing faces a performance plateau unless a disruptive processing tech emerges. 'We have reached the end of the technological era' of CMOS, said William Gropp, chairman of the SC13 conference and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gropp likened the supercomputer development terrain today to the advent of CMOS, the foundation of today's standard semiconductor technology. The arrival of CMOS was disruptive, but it fostered an expansive age of computing. The problem is 'we don't have a technology that is ready to be adopted as a replacement for CMOS,' said Gropp. 'We don't have anything at the level of maturity that allows you to bet your company on.' Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, and head of an international exascale software effort, said large supercomputer system prices have topped off at about $100 million 'so performance gains are not going to come from getting more expensive machines, because these are already incredibly expensive and powerful. So unless the technology really has some breakthroughs, we are imagining a slowing down.'" Although carbon nanotube based processors are showing promise (Stanford project page; the group is at SC13 giving a talk about their MIPS CNT processor).

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MIPS CNT... by motd2k · 2013-11-20 05:51 · Score: 5, Funny

MIPS CNT... how do you pronounce that?
Re:Work smarter, not harder. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2013-11-20 05:52 · Score: 2

Moving to clockless.
Chuck Moore-style?

Minimal use processors
That doesn't make sense. Or rather, makes multiple possible senses at once. Could you elaborate on what in particular do you have in mind?

--
Ezekiel 23:20
So what? by Animats · 2013-11-20 05:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

So what? Much of supercomputing is a tax-supported boondoggle. There are few supercomputers in the private sector. Many things that used to require supercomputers, from rocket flight planning to mould design, can now be done on desktops. Most US nuclear weapons were designed on machines with less than 1 MIPS.
Supercomputers have higher cost/MIPS than larger desktop machines. If you need a cluster, Amazon and others will rent you time on theirs. If you're sharing a supercomputer, and not using hours or days of time on single problems, you don't need one.
1. Re:So what? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-11-20 06:14 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  There are actually a half-decent number of 'supercomputers' -depending on how you define that term- in the private sector. From 'simple' ones that do rendering for animation companies to ones that model airflow for vehicles to ones that crunch financial numbers to.. well, lots of things, really. Are they as large as the biggest National faciltiies? Of course not - that's where the next generation of business-focused systems get designed and tested and models and methods get developed and tested.
  It is indeed the case that far simpler systems ran early nuclear weapon design, yes, but that's like saying far simpler desktops had 'car racing games' -- when, in reality, the quality of those applications has changed incredibly. Try playing an old racing game on a C64 vs. a new one now and you'd probably not get that much out of the old one. Try doing useful, region-specific climate models with an old system and you're not going to get much out of it. Put a newer model with much higher resolution, better subgrid models and physics options, and the ability to accurately and quickly do ensemble runs for a sensitivity analysis and, well, you're in much better territory scientifically.
  So, in answer to "So what?", I say: "Without improvements in our tools (supercomputers), our progress in multiple scientific -and business- endeavors slows down. That's a pretty big thing."
2. Re:So what? by Kjella · 2013-11-20 06:39 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Of course these people are using talking about supercomputers and the relevance to supercomputers, but you have to be pretty daft to not see the implications for everything else. In the last years almost all the improvement have been in power states and frequency/voltage scaling, if you're doing something at 100% CPU load (and isn't a corner case to benefit from a new instruction) the power efficiency has been almost unchanged. Top of the line graphics cards have gone constantly upwards and are pushing 250-300W, even Intel's got Xeons pushing 150W not to mention AMD's 220W beast, though that's a special oddity. The point is that we need more power to do more and for hardware running 24x7 that's a non-trivial part of the cost that's not going down.
  We know CMOS scaling is coming to an end, maybe not at 14nm or 10nm but at the end of this decade we're approaching the size of silicon atoms and lattices. There's no way we can sustain the current rate of scaling in the 2020s. And it wouldn't be the end of the world, computers would go roughly the same speed they did ten or twenty years ago like cars and jet planes do. Your phone would never become as fast as your computer which would never become as fast as a supercomputer again. We could get smarter at using that power of course, but fundamentally hard problems that require a lot of processing power would go nowhere and it won't be terahertz processors, terabytes of RAM and petabytes of storage for the average man. It was a good run while it lasted.
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
3. Re:So what? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-11-20 06:46 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Actually, the sort-of sad reality is that, outside the top few supercomputers in the world, the "top500" type lists are completely bogus because they don't include commercial efforts who don't care to register. Those public top-cluster lists are basically where tax-supported-boondoggles show off, but outside the top 5-10 entries (which are usually uniquely powerful in the world), the rest of the list is bullshit. There are *lots* (I'd guess thousands) of clusters out there that would easily make the top-20 or top-50 list of the public clusters, that are just undocumented publicly. So yes, "supercomputing"-level clusters are in wide commercial use. I know for a fact I've worked at two different companies in the past in this situation. One had a bit over 10K Opterons in a single datacenter wired up with Infiniband doing MPI-style parallelism, and this was back in like ... I want to say about 2005? They were using it to analyze seismic data to find oil. Never showed up on any list of supercomputers anywhere, like almost all commercial efforts.
4. Re:So what? by geekoid · 2013-11-20 07:53 · Score: 2
  
  "... current rate of scaling in the 1980s err 1990 err 2000, definitely 2000 err 2010.. I know; definitely 2020.
  
  --
  The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
5. Re:So what? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-11-20 08:19 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  They have no choice in the matter, since nobody makes 500GHz CPUs; but there is a reason why (many, not all) 'supercomputers' lay out a considerable amount of their budget for very fast, very low latency, interconnects (myrinet, infiniband, sometimes proprietary fabrics for single-system-image stuff), rather than just going GigE or 10GigE and calling it a day, like your generic datacenter-of-whitebox-1Us does.
  
  There are problems where chatter between nodes is low, and separate system images are acceptable, and blessed are they, for they shall be cheap; but people don't buy the super fancy interconnects just for the prestige value.
6. Re:So what? by lgw · 2013-11-20 10:45 · Score: 2
  
  Yes, the difference now is reaching the limits of physics, and even with something better than CMOS there's not much headroom. There's only so much state you can represent with one atom, and we're not that far off.
  I think the progress we'll see in the coming decades will be very minor in speed of traditional computers, significant in power consumption, and huge in areas like quantum computing, which are not incremental refinements of what we're so good at today.
  Our tools are nearly as fast as they reasonably can be, but that's not to say there aren't important gains to be had from different kinds of tools.
  
  --
  Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Does disruptive mean affordable? by UnknownSoldier · 2013-11-20 05:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

We've had Silicon Germanium cpus that can scale to 1000+ GHz for years. Graphene is also another interesting possibility.
The question is that "At what price can you make the power affordable?"
For 99% of people, computers are good enough. For the other 1% they never will be.
1. Re:Does disruptive mean affordable? by green+is+the+enemy · 2013-11-20 06:13 · Score: 2
  
  The problem is heat. Simple as that. Currently there are no technologies more power efficient than CMOS. Therefore there are no technologies that can produce more powerful computers than CMOS. If a significantly more power-efficient technology is found, the semiconductor manufacturers will absolutely attempt to use it.
2. Re:Does disruptive mean affordable? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2013-11-20 06:22 · Score: 2
  
  Do they also scale thermally? It is ultimately a problem of computations per joule, not a problem of computations per second. Supercomputers already have to use parallel algorithms, so building faster ones is about how much computing power can you squeeze into a cubic meter without the machine catching fire. That's actually the other reason why CMOS is being used, and not, e.g., ECL. ;-)
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
3. Re:Does disruptive mean affordable? by mlts · 2013-11-20 06:24 · Score: 2
  
  I'd say computers are good enough for today's tasks... but what about tomorrow's?
  With the advent of harder hitting ransomware, we might need to move to better snapshotting/backup systems to preserve documents against malicious overwrites which are made worse with SSD (TRIM zeroes out stuff, no recovery, no way.)
  Network bandwidth also is changing. LANs are gaining bandwidth, while WANs are stagnant. So, caching, CDN services, and such will be needing to improve. WAN bandwidth isn't gaining anything but more fees here in the US.
  Right now, the basic computer is sort of stagnant, but if fast WAN links become usable, this can easily change.
4. Re:Does disruptive mean affordable? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-11-20 06:57 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Even if you are willing to burn nigh unlimited power, thermals can still be a problem (barring some genuinely exotic approaches to cooling), because ye olde speed of light says that density is the only way to beat latency. There are, of course, ways to suck at latency even more than the speed of light demands; but there are no ways to suck less.
  
  If your problem is absolutely beautifully parallel (and, while we're dreaming, doesn't even cache-miss very often), horrible thermals would be a problem that could be solved by money: build a bigger datacenter and buy more power. If there's a lot of chatter between CPUs, or between CPUs and RAM, distance starts to hurt. If memory serves, 850nm light over 62.5 micrometer fiber is almost 5 nanoseconds/meter. That won't hurt your BattleField4 multiplayer performance; but when even a cheap, nasty, consumer grade CPU is 3GHz, there go 15 clocks for every meter, even assuming everything else is perfect. Copper is worse, some fiber might be better.
  
  Obviously, problems that can be solved by money are still problems, so they are a concern; but problems that physics tells us are insoluble are even less fun.
5. Re:Does disruptive mean affordable? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-11-20 07:02 · Score: 2
  
  Arguably, WAN bandwidth (except wireless, where the physics are genuinely nasty) is mostly a political problem with a few technical standards committees grafted on, rather than a technical problem.
  
  Even without much infrastructure improvement, merely scaring a cable company can, like magic, suddenly cause speeds to increase to whatever DOCSIS level the local hardware has been upgraded to, even as fees drop. Really scaring them can achieve yet better results, again without even driving them into insolvency, however much they might deserve it...
on the nature of disruptive... by schlachter · 2013-11-20 06:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

my intuition tells me that disruptive technologies are precisely that because people don't anticipate them coming along nor do they anticipate the changes that will follow their introduction. not that people can't see disruptive tech ramping up, but often they don't.

--
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
1. Re:on the nature of disruptive... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-11-20 07:24 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  my intuition tells me that disruptive technologies are precisely that because people don't anticipate them coming along nor do they anticipate the changes that will follow their introduction. not that people can't see disruptive tech ramping up, but often they don't.
  Arguably, there are at least two senses of 'disruptive' at play when people talk about 'disruptive technology'.
  
  There's the business sense, where a technology is 'disruptive' because it turns a (usually pre-existing, even considered banal or cheap and inferior) technology into a viable, then superior, competitor to a nicer but far more expensive product put out by the fat, lazy, incumbent. This comment, and probably yours, was typed on one of those(or, really, a collection of those.)
  
  Then there's the engineering/applied science sense, where it is quite clear to everybody that "If we could only fabricate silicon photonics/achieve stable entanglement of N QBits/grow a single-walled carbon nanotube as long as we want/synthesize a non-precious-metal substitute for platinum catalysts/whatever, we could change the world!"; but nobody knows how to do that yet.
  
  Unlike the business case (where the implications of 'surprisingly adequate computers get unbelievably fucking crazy cheap' were largely unexplored, and before that happened people would have looked at you like you were nuts if you told them that, in the year 2013, we have no space colonies, people still live in mud huts and fight bush wars with slightly-post-WWII small arms; but people who have inadequate food and no electricity have cell phones), the technology case is generally fairly well planned out (practically every vendor in the silicon compute or interconnect space has a plan for, say, what the silicon-photonics-interconnect architecture of the future would look like; but no silicon photonics interconnects, and we have no quantum computers of useful size; but computer scientists have already studied the algorithms that we might run on them, if we had them); but application awaits some breakthrough in the lab that hasn't come yet.
  
  (Optical fiber is probably a decent example of a tech/engineering 'disruptive technology' that has already happened. Microwave waveguides, because those can be tacked together with sheet metal and a bit of effort, were old news, and the logic and desireability of applying the same approach to smaller wavelengths was clear; but until somebody hit on a way to make cheap, high-purity, glass fiber, that was irrelevant. Once they did, the microwave-based infrastructure fell apart pretty quickly; but until they did, no amount of knowing that 'if we had optical fiber, we could shove 1000 links into that one damn waveguide!' made much difference.)
SOLUTION for CMOS "band gap" by kdawson+(3715) · 2013-11-20 06:08 · Score: 3, Interesting

I suggest we go back a few levels and back to the 1970's when TTL was being replaced because of it's higher voltages. Remember back when core memory was replaced but before CMOSS? These were the TTL eras made by similar but NOT THE SAME transistors.

1. Silicone bandgap of CMOSS is higher than TTL
2. Gate length is more fabricable. (Fabricate the gates in Mexico; say they were made in USA)
3. Drain has "quantum clogging" problems in TTL but not CMOSS
4. Dopant levels make GaAs less commercially feasible.
5. Wafer sizes still dominated by "silicon" technology. It is not cheaper to go to more e-toxic and alien technologies. Far cheaper to stick with the wafers commercially produced today. GaAs and Indium Phosphate are like communion wafers!!!
6. Investors. We need to keep money at the fore front. Global depression is iminint. Must make cheep and available components with "WHAT WE HAVE" allready!!

TTL. I think its a good idea.

-KD
1. Re:SOLUTION for CMOS "band gap" by ebno-10db · 2013-11-20 13:06 · Score: 2
  
  Bah. You want to burn power? Try ECL. The lights dimmed when you turned it on, but on the bright side you could cook your breakfast on a chip. ECL people were also using decent transmission line layout techniques for PCB's back in the 60's - a few decades before other digital designers had to worry about it. For many years the MECL handbook was the standard reference for hi-speed digital PCB design.
Re:Work smarter, not harder. by mlts · 2013-11-20 06:14 · Score: 3, Interesting

I wonder if the next breakthrough would be using FPGAs and configuring the instruction set for the task at hand. For example, a core gets a large AES encryption task, so it gets set to an instruction set optimized for array shifting. Another core gets another job, so shifts to a set optimized for handling trig functions. Still another set deals with large amounts of I/O, so ends up having a lot of registers to help with transforms, and so on.
Of course, fiber from chip to chip may be the next thing. This isn't new tech (the PPC 603 had this), but it might be what is needed to allow for CPUs to communicate closely coupled, but have signal path lengths be not as big an engineering issue. Similar with the CPU and RAM.
Then there are other bottlenecks. We have a lot of technologies that are slower than RAM but faster than disk. Those can be used for virtual memory or a cache to speed things up, or at least get data in the pipeline to the HDD so the machine can go onto other tasks, especially if a subsequent read can fetch data no matter where it lies in that I/O pipeline.
Long term, photonics will be the next breakthrough that propels things forward. That and the Holy Grail of storage -- holographic storage, which promises a lot, but has left many a company (Tamarak, InPhase) on the side of the road, broken and mutilated without mercy.
Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP? by tlambert · 2013-11-20 06:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP?
All our really big supercomputers today are adding a bunch of individual not-even-Krypto-the-wonderdog CPUs together, and then calling it a supercomputer. Have we reached the limits in that scaling? No.
We have reached the limits in the ability to solve big problems that aren't parallelizable, due to the inability to produce individual CPU machines in the supercomputer range, but like I said, that boat sailed years ago.
This looks like a funding fishing expedition for the carbon nanotube processor research that was highlighted at the conference.
1. Re:Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP? by timeOday · 2013-11-20 06:51 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  All our really big supercomputers today are adding a bunch of individual not-even-Krypto-the-wonderdog CPUs together, and then calling it a supercomputer. Have we reached the limits in that scaling? No.
  
  This is wrong on both counts. First, the CPUs built into supercomputers today are as good as anybody knows how to make one. True, they're not exotic, in that you can also buy one yourself for $700 on newegg. But they represent billions of dollars in design and are produced only on multi-billion dollar fabs. There is no respect in which they are not lightyears more advanced than any custom silicon cray ever put out.
  Second, you are wrong that we are not reaching the limits of scaling these types of machines. Performance does not scale infinitely on realistic workloads. And budgets and power supply certainly do not scale infinitely.
2. Re:Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-11-20 06:53 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  The problem is that there are many interesting problems which don't parallelize *well*. I epmhasize *well* because many of these problems do parallelize, it's just that the scaling falls off by an amount that matters the more thousands of processors you add. For these sorts of problems (of which there are many important ones), you can take Latest_Processor_X and use it efficiently in a cluster of, say, 1,000 nodes, but probably not 100,000. At some point the latency and communication and whatnot just takes over the equation. Maybe for a given problem of this sort you can solve it 10 days on 10,000 nodes, but the runtime only drops to 8 days on 100,000 nodes. It just doesn't make fiscal sense to scale beyond a certain limit in these cases. For these sorts of problems, single-processor speed still matters, because they can't be infinitely scaled by throwing more processors at the problem, but they can be infinitely scaled (well, within information-theoretic bounds dealing with entropy and heat-density) by faster single CPUs (which are still clustered to the degree it makes sense).
  CMOS basically ran out of real steam on this front several years ago. It's just been taking a while for everyone to soak up the "easy" optimizations that were laying around elsewhere to keep making gains. Now we're really starting to feel the brick wall...
Re:Work smarter, not harder. by Jane+Q.+Public · 2013-11-20 06:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

"Of course, fiber from chip to chip may be the next thing. This isn't new tech (the PPC 603 had this), but it might be what is needed to allow for CPUs to communicate closely coupled, but have signal path lengths be not as big an engineering issue. Similar with the CPU and RAM."
Fiber from chip to chip is probably a dead end, unless you're just primarily taking advantage of the speed of serial over parallel buses.

The problem is that you have to convert the light back to electricity anyway. So while fiber is speedier than wires, the delays (and expense) introduced at both ends limits its utility. Unless you go to actual light-based (rather than electrical) processing on the chips, any advantage to be gained there is strictly limited.

Probably more practical would be to migrate from massively parallel to faster serial communication. Like the difference between old parallel printer cables to USB. Granted, these inter-chip lineswould have to be carefully designed and shielded (high freq.), but so do light fibers.
Re:Work smarter, not harder. by symbolset · 2013-11-20 07:00 · Score: 3, Funny

Assume a spherical data center...

--
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Power and legacy codes by Orp · 2013-11-20 07:03 · Score: 2

... are the biggest problems from where I'm sitting here in the convention center in Denver.

In short, there will need to be a serious collaborative effort between vendors and the scientists (most of whom are not computer scientists) in taking advantage of new technologies. GPUs, Intel MIC, etc. are all great only if you can write code that can exploit these accelerators. When you consider that the vast majority of parallel science codes are MPI only, this is a real problem. It is very much a nontrivial (if even possible) problem to tweak these legacy codes effectively.

Cray holds workshops where scientists can learn about these new topologies and some of the programming tricks to use them. But that is only a tiny step towards effectively utilizing them. I'm not picking on Cray; they're doing what they can do. But I would posit that before the next supercomputer is designed, that it is done with input from the scientists who will be using it. There are a scarce few people with both the deep physics background and the computer science background to do the heavy lifting.

In my opinion we may need to start from the ground up with many codes. But it is a Herculean effort. Why would I want to discard my two million lines of MPI-only F95 code that only ten years ago was serial F77? The current code works "well enough" to get science done.

The power problem - that is outside of my domain. I wish the hardware manufacturers all the luck in the world. It is a very real problem. There will be a limit to the amount of power any future supercomputer is allowed to consume.

Finally, compilers will not save us. They can only do so much. They can't write better code or redesign it. Code translators hold promise, but those are very complex.

--
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
1. Re:Power and legacy codes by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-11-20 07:35 · Score: 2
  
  "Why would I want to discard my two million lines of MPI-only F95 code that only ten years ago was serial F77? The current code works "well enough" to get science done."
  
  Out of genuine curiosity (I'm not nearly familiar enough with either the economics or the cultural factors involved), would the hardware vendors, rather than the scientists(who, are scientists, not computer scientists, and just want to get their jobs done, not become programmers, so aren't strongly motivated to change), be in a position to attack the legacy code problem?
  
  While a lot of academic code isn't FOSS in the techie sense (it may be in some way encumbered, it may just never have been formally released at all, it may be a total wreck, etc.), I'd assume that most of it isn't so secret that a deal couldn't be arranged to get specific people a look at it, even if under NDA.
  
  If I were somebody like Intel or Nvidia, would it ever be worth my time to attempt to juice hardware sales (especially someone like Nvidia, whose strongest product is rather unlike a standard-issue general-purpose CPU cluster) by selling the customer on a combined "We'll sell you 10,000 Tesla boards, and provide software engineers to rebuild 'cranky-oldschool-geophysics-sim' as an equivalent; but CUDA-aware, application."
  
  Doable? Far too expensive? Faces serious pushback from the old timer who knows how to make that ol' fortran dance? Code considered too valuable to risk disclosure? People would rather be locked into a ghastly mess that is at least old enough to be widely supported, rather than some new and possibly proprietary ghastly-mess-in-10-years?
A lot of supercomputing motivated by bad science! by Theovon · 2013-11-20 07:19 · Score: 3, Interesting

There are plenty of algorithms that benefit from supercomputers. But it turns out that a lot of the justification for funding super computer research has been based on bad math. Check out this paper:
http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/pubs/dispelling-ieeedt-2013.pdf
It turns out that a lot of money has been spent to fund supercomputing research, but the researchers receiving that money were demonstrating the need for this research based on the wrong algorithms. This paper points out several highly parallelizable O(n-squared) algorithms that researchers have used. It seems that these people lack an understanding of basic computational complexity, because there are O(n log n) approaches to the same problems that can run much more quickly, using a lot less energy, on a single-processor desktop computer. But they’re not sexy because they’re not parallelizable.
Perhaps some honest mistakes have been made, it trends towards dishonestly as long as these researchers continue to use provably wrong methods.
Re:Complete garbage by The+Master+Control+P · 2013-11-20 07:26 · Score: 4, Informative

By definition, computers are scalable. Need more performance? Add more processing units/memory.
BZZZT, WRONG.

This is where you can stop reading, folks.
Micronize by Tim12s · 2013-11-20 07:59 · Score: 2

The next step has already started.
Micronizing truely massive supercomputers is the next step for "applied sciences". We've gotten used to measuring data centres in power, I recon it will be computing power per cubic foot or something like that. It'll start with drones, then it will move to shipping and long haul robotics. After that it'll move to mining applications. I'm not talking about automating but rather truly autonomous applications that require massive computation for collision avoidance and programmed execution.
At this point it'll be a race to redo the industrial age, albeit with micronized robotics. Again, already started with 3D printing.
Hopefully by then someone figures out how to get off this rock.
Tianhe-2? by therealobsideus · 2013-11-20 08:46 · Score: 3, Informative

Totally off topic, but I ended up getting drunk with a bunch of people that are here in town for SC13 last night. Those boys can drink. But I'm surprised that there wasn't more talk about Tianhe-2 there, and how Chinese is going to kick the US off the top 25 in international supercomputing.
Re:Work smarter, not harder. by Blaskowicz · 2013-11-20 14:59 · Score: 2

This makes me think of the Cray, nice-looking cylinder shape with a big mess of small wires inside. Or that video a while back where people were time-lapse wiring a cluster with lots of colored cables, in the center of it.