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Obama's New Executive Order Says the US Must Build an Exascale Supercomputer
Jason Koebler writes: President Obama has signed an executive order authorizing a new supercomputing research initiative with the goal of creating the fastest supercomputers ever devised. The National Strategic Computing Initiative, or NSCI, will attempt to build the first ever exascale computer, 30 times faster than today's fastest supercomputer. Motherboard reports: "The initiative will primarily be a partnership between the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and National Science Foundation, which will be designing supercomputers primarily for use by NASA, the FBI, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Homeland Security, and NOAA. Each of those agencies will be allowed to provide input during the early stages of the development of these new computers."
But can it run Crysis?
God spoke to me
What would the existence of an exascale supercomputer mean for today's popular encryption/hashing algorithms?
... NSA data center and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Will it blend?
IEEE Spectrum had an article last year describing some of the challenges we'll need to overcome in order to achieve exascale computing.
Here's another, somewhat pessimistic piece they posted in 2008 - a digest of a DARPA report that went into significant technical detail.
The biggest hurdle is power, and the biggest driver of that isn't the actual computation (i.e., the energy to perform some number of FLOPS), but rather moving that data around (between cores, to/from RAM, across a PCB, and among servers). Other hurdles include how to manage so many cores, ensure they are working (nearly) concurrently, how to handle hardware failures (which will be frequent given the amount of hardware), and writing software that can even make use of such technology in anything approaching optimal fashion.
Not to say its impossible, merely hard given the present state of things and projecting a bit into the future. But as we know, "it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." [source?]
For most specific problems thrown at supercomputers, you can go 30 times faster with a custom hardware architecture baked into silicon
To go 30 times fast for general purpose supercomputing, you use the latest silicon (2X) and more chips (15X) and come up with a super new interconnect to make it not suck. This would involve making some chips that support low latency IPC in hardware.
They are free to send me a few billion dollars, I'll get right on it and deliver a 30X faster machine and I'l even use some blue LEDs on the front panel.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Exactly.
My first thought was the new addition will be tasked by the NSA/FiveEyes to break encryption for intercepted communications.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
And random person freaks about because President exercises his lawful authority to tell agencies and departments under his jurisdiction to cooperate and present a plan for creating a supercomputer.
Here is a hint:
Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
the authority granted by law to an executive department, agency, or the head thereof; or
the functions of the Director of OMB relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
It is like nobody knows how the government operates any more, but if Obama does it, they're opposed, damn opposed.
Exactly.
My first thought was the new addition will be tasked by the NSA/FiveEyes to break encryption for intercepted communications.
Why are you assuming they don't already have one doing that, and this is just a public version?
There is a lot of highly secured government data infrastructure out there that I hear about even though not inquiring. The cable in Virginia that gets cut by a backhoe accidentally and guys in a black van show up ten minutes later. The contract for a government data center inside a faraday cage. The government likely already has much more computing power available than we know about.
640 petaflops ought to be enough for anybody.
Who in their right minds would let these people near a computer? Please. Let them go back to what they excel at: stealing cameras out of our luggage and groping underage genitalia.
Those issues will be resolved by a side effect of this being a government order. According to the GAO, on average it takes 4 1/2 years from the time the government orders a computer until it's installed. Right now, multiple government agencies have been told to start thinking about a plan. In two years (2017), each agency will have their plan and they'll start working to to resolve the differences between agencies. In another year (2018), they'll put out some RFPs. Those will go through the federal procurement process and the order will be placed about two years later (2020). That's when the 4 1/2 year average clock starts, so expect installation around first quarter 2025.
The goal is that it should be 30 times faster than TODAY'S computers.
And be operational in ten years. They can pretty much just order a Nexus 47, or an HP Proliant gen 12.
Mine Bit Coins
Synthesize the unicorn genome, to provide fuel for transportation and buy the votes of little girls.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
He can attempt to mandate all he wants. Congress approves the budgets. And since we all know how well Obama has been submitting his budgets....
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
And democrats have a hard on. Yes President Obama can create anything through executive action.
Just like all the others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or do you just want REpublicans to have that?
Rage on!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Don't worry, they are planning to use Oracle Linux. They are currently using the 2nd most powerful computer in the world to calculate how much the license will cost.
lucm, indeed.
These Peta/Exascale supercomputers are build for computer simulations (climate change, nuclear weapons stewardship, computational drug design, etc.), not for breaking encryption. That's also one reason no one is using them to mine Bitcoins: they're just not efficient at that job. To compute lots of hashes, dedicated hardware designs (read: ASICS) far outpace "general purpose" supercomputers.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
I see people speculating above about the government using this to break crypto, but that's really not a huge concern. If people use good keys that require brute force searching, even the smallest AES key size would take over a billion millenia to break at 10^18 ops/second (even assuming you could test a key on one "op"). And for people who use bad keys, you don't need exascale computing to break them.
So what could the FBI use something like this for? What about analysis of massive public and not-so-public data, like data mining Internet postings, email/phone records, ... Better not post something with the wrong combination of words, or someone might come knocking on your door.
Now if you want to hate on Obama, you could argue that this supercomputer will be designed by indentured servants from India, using components made in Malaysia, and assembled in China. And it will likely be true.
But, you can just call him names too, that's good.