HPCwire: Human-Scale Supercomputing

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

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

From the Editor | Main Blog Index

February 29, 2008

Human-Scale Supercomputing

In this issue, I highlighted a recent commentary written by Prof. Hans Werner Meuer, who writes about the 15 year anniversary of the TOP500 project. Meuer did a great job at recounting the history of the list and provided some interesting anecdotes of his favorite machines. Although in the past, I've offered criticism of the list, in the feature article I focused on some of the more practical aspects of the TOP500 project that Meuer discusses. That includes using the list as a historical record for tracking the evolution of high performance computing over the last decade and a half, and to project its future.

One of the more positive effects of the TOP500 project -- and one that Meuer doesn't mention -- is that it helps to popularize the notion of supercomputing to the wider industry and maybe more importantly, to the general public. While this might seem superficial, the twice yearly list at least provides valuable PR for the almost invisible HPC community.

Save for the occasional article in the mainstream media about how supercomputers have predicted climate changes or discovered some mystery of the universe, most of HPC is hidden from public view. The missing element in most stories about supercomputers is how they relate to the human condition at the scale of the individual. It's not that climate modeling, derivative pricing or seismic simulations are not worthwhile applications. But linking supercomputing to personal applications would inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers.

Consider this. In Meuer's 15-year TOP500 retrospective mentioned above, he talks about some of his favorite supercomputers, one of which was "Deep Blue," the IBM machine that bested world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Arguably the most famous supercomputer ever built, Deep Blue ranked a modest 259 on the 9th TOP500 list.

Writes Meuer:

"This system, named Deep Blue, was installed at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and had a best Linpack performance of 11.37 Gigaflop/s; it was an IBM SP2 P2SC with 32 processors and a clock rate of 120 MHz. But the floating point performance was not what really mattered: Each of the 32 processors was equipped with 15 special-purpose VLSI chess chips. Deep Blue was the first chess computer to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. Ten years after this event, no chess player stands a chance against any kind of computer, not even against a simple home computer. One year ago, in November/December 2006, Deep Fritz played a six-game match against reigning world chess champion Wladimir Kramnik in Bonn. Deep Fritz won 4-2."

The chess matchup inspired a book by Deep Blue's designer Feng-hsiung Hsu, "Behind Deep Blue," and a 2003 documentary, "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine." Since the machine was retired after beating Kasparov, no supercomputer has quite captured the public imagination the way Deep Blue did. Why? Almost everyone can relate to playing a game of chess, whether or not they have actually done so.

Contrast this with Meuer's number one favorite, Intel's ASCI Red, the first teraflop machine. Although, one of the most legendary supercomputers ever built, it's almost unknown outside of the HPC community. This machine was used to provide simulation capabilities for nuclear weapons -- an eminently useful task, but one not likely to be taken up by the average citizen (one hopes).

Software with elements of artificial intelligence (AI), like chess playing, constitute some of the most compelling computing applications to the public. And while AI and supercomputing might seem like a natural fit, for a variety of reasons, the two communities never really hooked up. Today, the AI field remains fragmented with a lot of competing paradigms and not much to show for it. Most of the work never made it out of the lab or the lecture hall. After 50-plus years of research, a lot computer techies sneer at the whole AI meme.

Yet it is these types of applications that have the potential to excite a new generation of technologists and motivate them to become involved in something more transformative than say quantum chromodynamics (not that there's anything wrong with QCD groupies). The commercialization of AI could help place supercomputing back into the public eye. We're not necessarily talking about "big iron" here. A lot of machine intelligence, though, will likely require massive levels of parallelism, in a tightly-coupled architecture (think manycore). Intel is currently developing a software model for terascale computing platforms that would enable such applications. Called RMS -- for recognition, mining, synthesis -- Intel believes this technology could be the basis for the killer apps of the next decade.

In Ray Kurzweil's 1990 book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," he talked about a number of AI systems that would be developed in the 21st century. At a time when Pac-Man was the cutting edge in computer games, he described computer-generated animation twenty years into the future with uncanny accuracy: "Reasonably lifelike video images of human faces ... completely synthesized and animated." He also predicted the triumph of a computer over the top human chess player by 1998 -- actually underestimating Deep Blue's accomplishment by one year.

In his book, Kurzweil mentioned a number of other applications that have not yet come to pass, including the cybernetic chauffeur, the intelligent assistant, the intelligent answering machine, and the translating telephone. The latter is a machine that would automatically translate the language of the two parties as they spoke in real-time. The technology required to do so includes automatic speech recognition, language translation, and speech synthesis. All three existed at the time the book was written 18 years ago, but not nearly at the level of sophistication they are today. With the continued improvement in microprocessor power and software, it is certainly conceivable that such technologies will be incorporated into virtually every phone and phone-like device within the next 10 years.

The effects of ubiquitous language translation would be enormous. That single application would not only greatly accelerate economic and social globalization, it would also revolutionize travel. By today's standards, Thomas Friedman's "Flat Earth" would look annoyingly bumpy.

In the meantime, HPC will continue to be used for such tasks as saving the Earth from global warming, protecting the nuclear arsenal, and cracking the genetic code. But after that, the real fun begins.

-----

As always, comments about HPCwire are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Michael Feldman, at editor@hpcwire.com.

Posted by Michael Feldman - February 29 @ 12:00AM

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCWire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCWire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

Cray Unveils New Cooling Technology For the Petascale Era

Cray, known for its power and packaging prowess since 1976, when Seymour Cray bent the Cray-1 into a "C" shape, is unveiling a petascale-era cooling technology it says is more than 10 times as efficient as same-size water coils. Cray CTO Steve Scott discusses this innovation and the company that was green before green was cool.
Read More...

HPC Simulations Help Researchers Develop Artificial Sniffer Technology

From law enforcement to cancer detection, the uncanny ability of dogs to sniff out the earliest signs of danger and disease is receiving ever-increasing attention by researchers. Despite tremendous advances in law enforcement technology, there is still no man-made tool that can detect the presence of explosives quite like a canine's sophisticated sniffing system.
Read More...

Will High-Speed Copper Interconnects Dim Optical's Prospects?

The prospects for optical cable interconnects never looked so good. With single and double data rate InfiniBand firmly entrenched in HPC clusters and quad data rate deployments just around the corner, optical cable makers are looking to displace bulky copper cabling in the next generation of high performance systems.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Heard at Hot Interconnects: Multicore SoCs May Require Optical Interconnect

Aug 27 | EDN | The lead-off session at the Hot Interconnects conference at Stanford examined the growing challenge of chip interconnect technology as today's multicore processors evolve into chips with tens or hundreds of cores. Read more...

Data Centers: Focusing on Sustainability

Aug 27 | Dr. Dobb's Portal | Dallas Thornton, director of Cyberinfrastructure Services for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, offers his thoughts on how energy concerns and other datacenter issues are affecting the industry. Read more...

China Aims for Petaflop Computer in 2010

Aug 27 | InfoWorld | China still lags behind its international rivals in chip development but is stepping up investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor. Read more...

Really Big Things

Aug 27 | Linux Magazine | How does one manage really big clusters? Perhaps nature can give us a clue. Read more...

Fujitsu Readies Eight-Core Sparc64 Chip

Aug 27 | Computerworld | Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Foundry High Performance Computing Application Note

Aug 01 | | The intent of this document is to provide an overview of Foundry Networks products that support high end HPCC configurations.

Improving Performance and Manageability for Seismic Processing and Imaging Applications with Parallel Storage

Jun 05 | | As pressure increases on the upstream seismic processing community to deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation of storage solutions will be required that allow the maximum utilisation of high-performance computing (HPC) Linux cluster resources, together with the minimum of management overhead.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Podcast: Interview with Ben Bennett of ClearSpeed Technology

Today, HPC organizations are requiring substantially more floating point performance to solve real-world problems. In this podcast, Ben Bennett, ClearSpeed General Manager, discusses how acceleration technology can improve the overall performance of standard x86-based systems...