HPCwire: TeraGrid '09: Thriving in an Exponentially Changing World

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July 06, 2009

TeraGrid '09: Thriving in an Exponentially Changing World

by Bill Bell, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

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Before he even took the podium, Ed Seidel was one of the buzz makers at the TeraGrid '09 conference. The day before his keynote, it was announced that he was stepping in as acting assistant director of the National Science Foundation's math and physical sciences directorate. For his talk at the conference, however, Seidel focused on the issues and efforts within his home at NSF, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

Computational science is "fundamentally changing in very serious ways and on exponential paths," he said.

We can see those changes across many different disciplines. As an example, he used his own field of astrophysics.

In the early 1970s, "brilliant scientists were doing groundbreaking work" alone or in very small groups. Some of Stephen Hawking's early work was done alone, based on mere kilobytes of data, and was illustrated with a hand-drawn sketch. About 20 years later, Seidel was part of a team of about 10 working with about 50 megabytes of data -- five years after that, 50 gigabytes of data. Today, astrophysicists work on hundreds of terabytes of data, and they work on much more complicated problems that require researchers from a variety of subdisciplines.

Over the past three decades, the amount of data created by astrophysicists' simulations has increased by 12 orders of magnitude, and "it's happening everywhere."

Geophysics problems have followed a similar curve. Atmospheric scientists, hydrodynamics researchers, data experts, economists, sociologists, and civil engineers all come together to understand severe weather like hurricanes and people's reactions to them. They rely on tools like sensors delivering live data, computational models that couple several aspects of the problem to one another, and fast networks.

These sorts of "grand challenge communities" are intensely dynamic. Not every project requires every member of the team's expertise nor every tool in the cyberinfrastructure toolbox. What they do require, according to Seidel, is a new way of thinking about computational science.

These communities have massive intellectual and technical capacity, and they drive larger simulations and need to process and make sense of growing amounts of data. Accordingly, they also require solutions to a set of what Seidel called "crises" in high-performance computing.

Despite these "crises," Seidel remains optimistic. A key theme of his talk was that: "We are getting there. The TeraGrid is a good example of the fact that we are getting there. I believe it is the world's best environment for advancing computationally oriented science and engineering research."

"We are transforming science through cyberinfrastructure."
Ed Seidel at TeraGrid'09

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