Where Does All the Computer Power Go?

Read "Faster Computers Accelerate Pace of Discovery" by Christopher Lee, The Washington Post, December 3, 2007.

The first "petascale" supercomputer, capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, should be in operation next year. That is about twice as powerful as the most powerful computer today.

The computing muscle of the new petascale machines will be akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined, experts say. A computation that would take a lifetime for a home PC and that can be completed in about five hours on today's supercomputers will be doable in as little as two hours.

Attached to the article is a video describing Roadrunner, a 1.5 petaflop machine being built now that incoporates broadband modules with the processors, and which is described as offering great visualization tools for the users to interpret the results of experiments done with the high-performance computer.

Even before a petascale computer is a reality, scientists are anticipating the next big milestone, the exascale machine -- a thousand times more powerful still, and capable of 1 million trillion calculations per second. But they'll have to wait. That one isn't expected until about 2018.

Roadrunner and its cousins will make possible dramatically improved computer simulations that will shed new light on climate change, geology, drug development, dark matter and other secrets of the universe, as well as other fields in which direct experimental observation is time-consuming, costly, dangerous or impossible.

computer climate models can now simulate atmospheric and oceanic conditions and, crucially, how changes in each affect the other, experts said. Now the worry is not that computing power is inadequate but that the aging of NASA's weather satellites will lead to a shortage of input data before long, Seager and others said.

Petascale computers also will make it possible to predict, say, the effect of an earthquake on every building in downtown Los Angeles, experts said. Current models cannot yield predictions for areas smaller than a square mile or two. The increased detail could help shape building codes and be a valuable tool in evacuation planning and disaster preparedness......

Still another is the modeling of the bird flu virus and how t might evolve to become more communicable and lethal -- knowledge that could help scientists develop a vaccine in time to use it and to inform public health planning. Petascale computers are also expected to lead to more potent models for Wall Street to calculate risk and predict the fate of financial instruments, as well as more advanced digital prototypes of automobiles and jet aircraft, further reducing the need for physical mock-ups.....

Today's supercomputers rely not only on better "compute nodes" (made up of faster chips and more memory), but also on scientists' ability to "gang" hundreds of thousands of those nodes together in a single machine and to devise better ways of having them communicate with one another and divide up the work of complex problem solving.

"If you ran today's code on yesterday's computers, they would be much faster," said Raymond Bair, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. "People have figured out how to solve the problems faster."

Comment: Those who discuss the digital divide often focus on personal computers and connections to the Internet. If a petaflop computer is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of PCs, then an exascale machine would have the power of hundreds of millions of today's PCs. The digital divide should consider not only the number of machines, but overall computer power.

More to the point, an exascale machine will make possible work on commercial aircraft design and other industrial products that are simply impossible to do economically now. Only countries that can afford such machines will be in the field of developing those aircraft and other products requiring complex computation.

Thus there will be a digital divide in petascale machines in the near future, and one in exascale machines in a decade or so, and those divides will mean a divide in commercial innovation capacity between have and have-not countries. JAD