HPCwire

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

From the Editor | Main Blog Index

The Secret Life of Supercomputers


There were a couple of stories floating around the Intertubes in the past week or so that reminded me of how little we know about large classes of HPC applications. That's not a good thing.

The first story is about the arrest of former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, who allegedly made off with proprietary trading software the firm used to execute high volume, low latency automated trading. The news was covered in Bloomberg and elsewhere, and is a compelling tale of espionage in the financial services industry. Here's the money quote, so to speak, from the Bloomberg report:

The proprietary code lets the firm do "sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets," prosecutors said in court papers. The trades generate "many millions of dollars" each year.

The second story concerns espionage too -- in this case, the more old-fashioned kind. Apparently the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning to construct a $2 billion dollar datacenter in Utah that will eventually consume 65 megawatts to power new supercomputers. The agency's current facility in Fort Meade, Maryland, is already power-constrained, preventing the NSA from installing any more supers at that site. The Salt Lake City Tribune reported that the new Utah datacenter will be used to support the NSA's intelligence-gathering mission. The Tribune used congressional budget documents to squeeze a bit more detail from the story:

The supercomputers in the center will be part of the NSA's signal intelligence program, which seeks to "gain a decisive information advantage for the nation and our allies under all circumstances" according to the documents.

Of course, the speculation is that the NSA is using these supers to perform domestic spying -- a program begun under the Bush administration and now being continued under the Obama regime. The Fort Meade machine is a Cray "Black Widow" super, which is reportedly sifting through emails and phone conversations to find out who's been naughty and nice.

The nexus of these two stories is that secrecy prevents the public from knowing the full breadth of HPC applications. In the case of the government, it's for national security reasons; for financial institutions, it's to maintain competitive advantage. But it's not just the financial industry and government intelligence domains (although these two areas are probably the most discrete in regard to technology transparency). You'll notice, for example, that the energy industry, commercial biotech companies, and automobile/aerospace manufacturers aren't giving public tours of their HPC datacenters either.

Even the TOP500 list reflects this secretive nature. The list is quickly becoming an anonymous record of supercomputing, where many of the users are only listed generically (for example, Financial Institution, Government, IT Provider, Semiconductor Company, and so on). This is especially true as you move toward the end of the list, where there are fewer public institutions. On the June 2009 TOP500 list, 78 of the bottom 100 supercomputers are listed anonymously.

By contrast, HPC being performed by national labs, supercomputing centers, and academic institutions is highly publicized, and tends to be very visible on the TOP500 list. These organizations are constantly on the prowl for grants, funding and other sorts of collaboration, so it pays for them to advertise what they're up to. Plus researchers tend to be a talkative bunch anyway. I suspect this is the reason that the public generally only associates supercomputing with applications like climate modeling and looking for galactic black holes.

What's the result of all this secrecy? Besides giving the public a skewed view of the industry, it also makes the technology invisible to a larger number of developers. Consider that most HPC apps are still implemented in legacy languages like Fortran and C, while "public" applications for personal computers or the Web are using more modern software frameworks, like Java, .NET, Python, etc. Even though HPC is not a volume industry in terms of software licenses, if more codes were public, you'd probably see a much more rapid development of libraries and tools (which is one reason why CUDA software has developed so quickly). Keeping software in silos makes for a lousy ecosystem.

The other aspect to secrecy is that it encourages the kind of bad behavior that Aleynikov and the US government are being accused of. There's nothing inherently wrong with protecting state secrets and proprietary IP, but eventually the whole model can become self defeating. Consider this: arguably, two of the biggest catastrophes of this young 21st century are that of US intelligence regarding 9/11 and Iraq and the collapse of the financial industry. Both institutions relied on keeping information siloed to such an extent that even the institutions themselves couldn't explain the data. And when the secrets are lies, nobody will know until it's too late.

Posted by Michael Feldman - July 8 @ 5:37PM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.  

Sponsored Links

SDSC and Appro Next-Generation Supercomputer: SC09 Video Interview
Learn how SDSC and Appro are pushing the envelope and have come up with a supercomputer design that delivers 32 "supernodes".

Appro Ready-To-Go-Clusters – Quickly deploy ANSYS & Intel Cluster Ready Solutions
Offering a fully integrated Ready-To-Go Cluster based on the Appro GreenBlade System supporting up to 28 blade nodes in a half-size standard rack cabinet, including master nodes and switches.

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman



Recent Comments

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html

Blogs by Topics

Blogs by Author

HPC Blogroll



Featured Events

BrightTALK
HPCC
HPC User Forum DICE
Cloud Slam
Cloud Computing Expo
DEISA PRACE Symposium