Grids for Kids: Building the Foundation for Innovation

By By Tom Gibbs, Contributing Author

August 7, 2006

If you asked many industry/economic analysts around the world to name the most important variable in future economic growth off the top of their heads, the knee-jerk answer today would be the price of oil. Of course the cost of energy will be a major factor in all of our futures, but C-level industry executives will tell you that their most important resources are the gooey blobs nestled in the skulls of their wonderful employees.

The key to economic growth for companies and the countries and regions they call home is the educational level of their workforces. Many world leaders who recognize this also recognize the importance that Internet Communication Technology (to the point that it's an acronym — ICT) has as a tool for both education, as well as implementation of completive business process in the near future. Grid computing and communications as a metaphor for large-scale distributed computing and communications will be a cornerstone of the growth of ICT, and hence will play an increasing role in this growth, particularly as Grid evolves from Grid 1.0, which was focused on large-scale simulation, to Grid 2.0, which is focused on large-scale collaboration.

On a macroeconomic level, the quality of living as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in those countries that opted in has been trucking along at about 2 percent per year since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Education will be a key in increasing the ability to innovate on a global basis. Put simply, innovation is the key to finding an energy source to replace oil before it runs out, and that will require lots of smart people around the planet.

If anyone questions the hinge factor that education provides, I recommend a fabulous Web site: www.gapminder.org. If you haven't tried this site before, the tool it developed to show changes in multiple parameters compared against each other is outstanding. If you go to the charts for “world education,” which show GDP over time for multiple countries around the world as a function of the school life expectancy for a given country, it's unequivocal. GDP putters along in the poverty doldrums — unless the country sits on top of huge oil reserves — until the school life expectancy hits about eight years, and then it takes off like a rocket and stabilizes when the expectancy is about 13 years. Essentially, unless the average school life of the next wave of business leaders is the equivalent of a U.S. high school diploma — to paraphrase the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes — life many not be desperate, brutal and short, but it will be poor.

World-leading institutions — from the World Bank to the UN, and a slew of non- governmental organizations — have concluded that proficiency with technology, which includes widespread access to ICT, is a critical aspect of both education and basic infrastructure if a country or region is going to be able to stimulate growth in the global economy. If we accept that as even partially true, the situation is pretty grim, as only 40 million K-12 students out of a population of roughly 1 billion have regular access to a PC and the Internet. Educators and political leaders from Singapore to Western China to New York City are grappling with this reality and see the Grid as an interesting way to address this issue.

The first wave of discussion on this topic started a few years ago and centered on Grid 1.0 usage, primarily exploring ways the cost could be amortized across a wider base. Essentially, the PCs in the classroom would be made available to business and scientific research and the multi-use could help spread the cost. For a very slick example of how this works, I'd recommend going to the site www.tryscience.com. Organizations like the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN), which can be found at www.mcnc.org, have been successfully engaged in this class of ICT-supported education and economic stimulus for nearly 20 years. In fact, Wolfgang Gentzsch, who headed MCNC's Grid Computing and Networking Services division from 2004 through 2005, is a huge proponent of the use of Grid computing for K-12 students.

The opportunity with Grid 1.0 is to make high-performance computing available to young scientists and, in most cases, to try and use the infrastructure to support local technology businesses to compete with larger multi-nationals. When you look at the applications that are considered, such as computational fluid dynamics or monte carlo simulation, the first reaction is: “Hang on!” What high school student is even going to understand this stuff? Well, it's not the general population, of course, but it is likely the technology innovators of the future. For example, the title of one of the scholarships awarded at the  Intel International Science Fair this past year was “Real-Time Remeshing with Optimally Adapting Domain: A New Scheme for View-Dependent Continuous Levels-of-Detail Mesh Rendering,” which was done by Yuanchen Zhu  of China. Another was for “Petrology, Morphology and Geochemistry of the Southern Juan de Fuca Ridge,” which was done by Sarah Rose Langberg from Florida.

OK, so I wasn't doing this level of work in high school, and neither were most people, but that doesn't mean we should hold back the technology superstars. Heck, the petrology work just might keep the oil flowing. When Sam Cooke crooned “Teach Me Tonight,” I'm sure we wasn't looking for his date to help him discover a massive new oil reserve under a salt dome in the ocean, but at current prices he might reconsider his objective. Go, girl, go!

The challenge, of course, with using Grid 1.0 for K-12 is the issue with Grid 1.0 overall: the potential user base is just too small if you take the population of K-20 students and include all those who graduated who can actually do the level of science that requires large scale simulation. However, this doesn't mean it's a bad idea or that we shouldn't do it. It just means it's hard to justify.

If we expand the usage from Grid 1.0 to Grid 2.0, things get very interesting. Grid 2.0 is all about enabling mass collaboration. Students around the world in the critical grades for economic growth (8-12) have opted in with their fingers and eyeballs to large-scale, albeit shallow, collaboration though Web 2.0 sites such as MySpace, which boasts more than 40 million users.

I believe that extending Grid 2.0 collaboration into multiple disciplines — from history to sociology to good, old-fashioned science — offers tremendous opportunities. I discussed the online reality game Second Life in a recent article. This game is being used by researchers in a number of areas, from economics to sociology, to try and better understand human behavior. Moreover, the world economy is moving from locally isolated business to a complex web of connected businesses where labor moves to its most efficient delivery point. Companies that succeed, and the workers who make it so, will have to be very comfortable working in an environment where digitally supported collaboration is as common as e-mail is today. Workers will need to be very comfortable and literate with using these tools in the coming decade.

In the beginning (of the Internet, that is), DARPAnet and NSFnet were typically used by scientists to communicate with each other. E-mail at the time was a huge step forward from the alternatives. Today, the tools are Wiki sites, blogs and other similar online forums that allow multiple participants to actively engage in idea formulation and dialogue. These tools all run on distributed environments — grids.

Companies and local economies that need to bootstrap their workers and citizens into the global collaborative world can share their local education grids as a way to share both the wealth and the expense. This opens up a much wider usage model to a much wider set of businesses, and will help with the knotty justification arguments that need to be addressed to kickstart widespread deployment that will be needed if we hope to sustain the continued rise in the standard of living we hope all can come to enjoy.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire