President Obama Calls for Massive Boost in Power of Supercomputers
7:07 pm ET Aug 10, 2015
President Obama Calls for Massive Boost in Power of
Supercomputers
By STEVEN NORTON
President Barack Obama issued an executive order at the
end of July calling for the creation of a National Strategic Computing
Initiative, with the goal of building a supercomputer that can deliver 100
times the performance of current 10 petaflop systems and improving technologies
used for data analytics. The order also calls for bettering the
high-performance computing ecosystem and ensuring that “the benefits of the
research and development advances are … shared between the United States
Government and industrial and academic sectors.”
The order follows a long line of public initiatives in
which the government has been a catalyst for major technological change. The
rise of the early space program and the formation of the Internet in the 1960s
and 1970s are the most obvious examples of this public-private role. More
recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has kicked-started
research in self-driving vehicles and other kinds of robotics. The role of
government in the tech sector has a long and complex history, but it’s often at
its best when it is playing the role of catalyst, mustering public assets and
will to solve large problems.
Now, as some experts question whether the pace of
technological innovation is slowing, a government challenge designed to
radically boost computing power has the potential to open the way for big leaps
in technological capability. History suggests there is some reason for
optimism, although balancing the needs of business and government can be
difficult.
The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency laid the
groundwork for the modern Internet with ARPANET in the 1960s. Supercomputing
itself got its start in the U.S. national laboratories with help from
technology companies, according to a 2014 report from the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation. Technology key to hydraulic fracturing,
more commonly known as fracking, also grew with the help of U.S. research
efforts, the report said. Some of that has come out of U.S. investment in basic
research, seen as a key driver of broader economic competitiveness.
Close collaboration between the government, industry and
academia is a guiding principle of the executive order. Developing technology
alongside industry partners is a critical part of the executive order. But it
will be a challenge to create technology that meets the extreme needs of the
government while also being useful to industry at large, said Bob Sorensen, an
analyst with IDC who covers high-performance computing. “It’s going to take a
lot of thought to make sure they don’t mandate something that has no
applicability in the marketplace.”
Juggling the needs of government and industry sometimes
creates a tension between the two parties, said Dave Turek, vice president for
high performance computing at International Business Machines Corp. “There’s
always a balancing point: how do you begin to shape your design and
architecture for the extreme needs of the government versus the benefits that
would accrue into the industrial space,” he said. Mr. Turek is responsible for
the company’s overall high performance computing strategy.
He said these kinds of questions are generally ironed out
before government agencies put out requests for proposals, when companies
discuss with those agencies how they plan to use the technology for their
conventional businesses. IBM is one of the companies working with the U.S.
government on supercomputers. Other companies often competing in the
supercomputing arena include Cray Inc. and Intel Corp.
The order also calls for a technological path forward for
the “post- Moore’s Law era,” when semiconductor technology can no longer plow
meaningfully greater processing power into smaller and smaller machines at the
same pace it has maintained in recent decades. While chipmakers have said they
can keep shrinking chips for a while longer, it’s becoming more expensive and
fewer companies may want to shoulder the task. A way forward may just have to
come from a public-private partnership.
The diverse range of technologies underlying supercomputers,
including networking and data analytics tools, increases the opportunity to
impact broader industries. Simultaneous research and development going into all
of those separate components could produce unexpected commercial applications
along the way, Mr. Turek said.
There order comes amid considerable competition from
China, which currently runs the world’s fastest supercomputer. Last week, China
said it would curb exports of advanced drones and supercomputers as part of a
continued push to control technology linked to national security, the WSJ
reported. In April 2015, the U.S. blocked technology exports to Chinese
technical centers associated with the Tianhe-2, China’s supercomputer.
Silicon Valley companies might play a role in the
process, Mr. Sorensen said, but many lack the resources necessary to respond to
a bid request and establish relationships with national laboratories. Still, he
added, “raising the entrepreneurial spirit of U.S. R&D” could go a long way
toward ensuring economic competitiveness.
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