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Does Being First Still Matter In America?
dcblogs writes At the supercomputing conference, SC14, this week, a U.S. Dept. of Energy offical said the government has set a goal of 2023 as its delivery date for an exascale system. It may be taking a risky path with that amount of lead time because of increasing international competition. There was a time when the U.S. didn't settle for second place. President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous "we choose to go to the moon" speech in 1962, and seven years later a man walked on the moon. The U.S. exascale goal is nine years away. China, Europe and Japan all have major exascale efforts, and the government has already dropped on supercomputing. The European forecast of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was so far ahead of U.S. models in predicting the storm's path that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was called before Congress to explain how it happened. It was told by a U.S. official that NOAA wasn't keeping up in computational capability. It's still not keeping up. Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington, wrote on his blog last month that the U.S. is "rapidly falling behind leading weather prediction centers around the world" because it has yet to catch up in computational capability to Europe. That criticism followed the $128 million recent purchase a Cray supercomputer by the U.K.'s Met Office, its meteorological agency.
First post!
Table-ized A.I.
From TFS:
We only walked on the moon seven years later because we'd already been developing the parts - for as much as six years in the case of the F1 engine. And because President Kennedy died in 1963 (before he could completely back away from the commitment), allowing LBJ to push for funding as a monument.
Not to mention we couldn't really end up in second place - because we were essentially the only runner in the race. The Soviets were years late in starting because they didn't believe we'd actually even stick with it. And even when they did enter the race, it was a half hearted effort with little political support.
Being first still matters a lot. Just not in the metrics you admire.
External debt? USA#1 at $17E+12 and growing fast. Corporate tax rate? Number one baby. Rate of medical cost growth? We go that. Education cost growth? Ditto. Firearms per capita? We own the whole right hand side of that histogram. Because we lack a 50% peasant population to drop the average (like China) we're still far ahead in per capita carbon production. We're the largest oil producer on Earth as well.
So yeah, #1 still matters.
I'm going to present an alternate theory. Don't blame the media.
Blame American citizens. We have developed a collective... bluster about science. An approach where random shit we think we know trumps years of hard research and challenging facts.
It's not just creationists and global warming deniers and anti-vaccers, you know stand-out cases of pushing for ideas based on utter nonsense, but the subtler, softer kind too. I'm having a damn hard time coming up with examples that won't draw out a flamewar from people indignant about how I'm insulting them, so I'll try to speak in general terms:
People talking about what they know about genetics in a way that just utterly predicts everything about a person. Maybe people taking a middle-of-the-road soft stance against nuclear energy because radiation is dangerous. Not radically anti-science like the former groups, just self-assured and wrong.
The media certainly exacerbates this by being willing to drag any public controversy to the forefront of national discussion to fill airtime, but they aren't the source. We are.
Does the National Weather Service need that computing power all the time, or could they buy it during major hurricanes from cloud services?
Uh, actually, that constitution you mention lists a few more things than "common defense and currency"
form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America
Considering they led with this, it's kind of embarrassing you don't know it.
Actually, Congress did give NOAA more money for a new supercomputer. The computer hasn't materialized because NOAA is locked into a single-source contract with IBM. As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo). It seems some people are antsy about the implications for a Chinese company providing the computer behind a critical national security capability (weather prediction).
As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo).
What TFA says is:
The linked article says:
I don't know what "[IBM's] supercomputer division" is, but it's not a division that solely develops and sells x86 servers; they also sell Power Architecture HPC systems.
However, at least in 2012, they spoke of iDataPlex servers for NOAA, so they sold that part of their supercomputer efforts to Lenovo. Whether they'll push for Power Architecture HPC systems for NOAA instead is another matter.
One of the things that drove the race for the moon was us losing the space race with the Soviet Union. Having that big a Cold War enemy was a huge boost in one respect (mandates to educate the population and advance science) and a huge detractor in another (who-knows-how-many trillions of dollars wasted on a nuclear arms race that neither side actually needed to participate in.)
I think the times are different now:
- Education isn't seen as a guarantee of a decent job anymore, so fewer people are spending the money and effort on it.
- Decent jobs are no longer guaranteed either, so people are more concerned with day to day survival than long-term planning.
- We don't have a huge boogeyman like the USSR ready to wipe us out the second we let up the pressure...the closest thing now is China, and they're our biggest trade partners.
- Media is more fragmented. You can argue either side of this point, but the world was a lot simpler when there were only 3 TV networks, a much longer news cycle and newspapers of record that did real journalism. Now no one can make any sort of controversial move without 200 news analysts jumping all over it and putting forth their opinion as fact.
- People don't trust large institutions or governments, who are often the only entities big or powerful enough to mandate huge changes or push science forward. (Example: AT&T funding Bell Labs with phone company revenues leading to breakthrough inventions, or the US funding Apollo and other NASA programs.)
I think that some of these factors make it impossible to be "first" in key areas, simply because no one is willing to stick their neck out and invest the time, effort or resources.