HPCwire: Who's the Dinosaur Here?

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June 12, 2008

Who's the Dinosaur Here?

I recently asked my son, a first year Ph.D. Neuroscience student at a leading New England university, what he knows about high performance computing or supercomputing. His first response was (somewhat kidding), "Do you mean like the old Cray computer that was used in Jurassic Park?"

Well, yeah... but I would have thought that a young researcher might have run across HPC in his post-baccalaureate science courses at Harvard, or during the three years he worked as a senior research technologist in the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND) doing mouse brain research, or during his first year of doctoral work. Wouldn't you? Turns out he's never heard anyone on any of his research teams talk about HPC or supercomputers. Nor has the technology's role in the hard sciences been incorporated into the curricula.

I happen to know that his undergraduate institution, the University of Massachusetts, is the same one whose physics department assembled the PS3Gravity Grid, a sixteen PS3 cluster, to explore black holes, and that his current academic institution is home to an advanced computing center with great resources. We won't even discuss Harvard.

Every conference I have attended in the last year has included discussions on the next generation of HPC users, and researchers and vendors alike bemoan the fact that we are not preparing this next generation to use the high performance computing technology all of you rely on. To quote from the announcement for the upcoming International Advanced Research Workshop on High Performance Computing and Grids, June 30-July 4 in Cetraro, Italy: "HPC is viewed as one of the most important technologies of the 21st Century.... Significant amounts of energy and financial resources have been invested by governments and private sectors for building adequate infrastructures and human skills to enable the expected benefits. Yet, despite many spectacular accomplishments of HPC, this tool is still underutilized by many academic schools, industrial companies and businesses."

As the person who's been helping with the tuition for the last eight years, I have a vested interest in raising awareness of the underutilization of HPC in academia, particularly among the undergraduate and graduate student populations. You all have a vested interest as well. So, the question is, what can we, all of us in the HPC community, do to raise awareness and get this knowledge and skill set into the hands of tomorrow's scientists, researchers and engineers?

Posted by Diane Lieberman - June 12 @ 5:00PM

Discussion

There are 4 discussion items posted.

Dinosaur HPC
Submitted by $user.username on 06/12/2008 - 9:44PM

Jurassic Park used a Thinking Machines computer, not a Cray. Of course, it wasn't a real computer but it had the largest number of lights of any machine produced by TMC. Los Alamos had the largest one of its actual machines.

Post #1

Education and HPC
Submitted by $user.username on 06/13/2008 - 6:03AM

First, academia and industry must deploy accessible and useful machines where students can get to them. Big behemoths need not apply, we're talking thousands of machines here.

Second, deploy them so that they can be used interactively: Big behemoths need not apply, unless they chuck the PBS/LSF/IronGateWithArmedGuard
scheduling discipline.

Finally, make them available outside as well as inside the curriculum. Our best engineers weren't motivated by grades and merit badges, they were turned on by the technology and what they could do with it.

--matt reilly www.bigNcomputing.org

Post #2

Actually, they're both right
Submitted by JohnWest on 06/17/2008 - 2:08AM

In the book the computers used by park researchers were Crays. In the movie Thinking Machines model CM-5 systems are shown (along with Macs and SGIs, including an old Crimson that wasn't plugged in).

Post #3

The missing link
Submitted by icehawk on 06/21/2008 - 4:47AM

I have spoken with several HPC colleagues about the lack of a proper interface between HPC Systems and the scientists that use them. Just because you’re an expert in (fill in the blank) doesn’t mean you can, or even have a willingness, to learn how to port your science into some mathematical algorithm that a computer can understand, or even to use the existing codes that are currently available.

There needs to be a class of people out there that understands the science enough to interface properly with the researcher, while at the same time has a deep enough understanding of HPC systems to properly help port code to that platform. Contrary to popular belief, not all supercomputers are super for all codes. (-:

We don’t need a dedicated HPC systems analyst, nor a dedicated researcher, but instead someone somewhere in between. Someone who won’t go all geek on the researcher and yet at the same time ask questions like, what’s a cache hit?

Imagine a supercomputing center with a staff of dedicated computational experts in Biology, chemistry, physics, etc that are there strictly to interface with the researchers. It would be nice.

Rich

Post #4

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Diane Lieberman

Diane Lieberman is the Senior Vice President for Tabor Communications and the Publisher of HPCwire and On-Demand Enterprise.

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