Europe Plans Exascale Funding Above U.S. Levels 70
dcblogs writes "The European Commission last week said it is doubling its multi-year investment in the push for exascale computing from €630 million to €1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion). They are making this a priority even as austerity measures are imposed to prevent defaults. China, meanwhile, has a five-year plan to deliver exascale computing between 2016-20 (PDF). The Europeans announced the plan the same week the White House released its fiscal year 2013 budget, which envisions a third year of anemic funding to develop exascale technologies. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy science budget asked for nearly $91 million in funding for the efforts in the current fiscal year; it received $73.4 million. DOE science is trying for about $90 million for exascale for 2013. There's more funding tucked in military and security budgets. The U.S. wants exascale around 2018, but it has yet to deliver a plan or the money for it."
US probably already has it! (Score:3, Interesting)
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And if they don't the NSA can just steal it!
Help Me Understand? (Score:1)
Why is everyone pushing for exascale computing? What is such a super computer used for? Couldn't a massive distributed system work just as well?
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Re:Help Me Understand? (Score:5, Informative)
One big reason why an exa-scale installation is generally better than an exa-scale distributed project is that of Data Transfer.
Distributed computing is plagued by Data Transfer bottlenecks. If it's an internet project, the cumulative effect of combined bandwidth does add up. But serving out project segments at exa-scale levels is very expensive, and equally expensive receiving the solution chunks. There's also the problem of "internet climatology" (I'm not sure what it's really called) where the connections aren't uniform. While the internet does "self-heal" it takes time, and that adds up as well.
Basically, when you scale up the computing power on a distributed project, the problems scale too. Out of order processing of problem chunks also causes problems when peers join and drop out in unpredictable ways. Often the same chunk has to spend many times more cycles than actually required, due to peers getting bored with the work, or just testing out the system and dropping the piece they're working on.
An exa-scale supercomputer would remove the problem of collaboration overhead, or at least significantly reduce it. Scheduling is much more efficient, and in the end FLOPS doesn't measure performance in any reliable qualitative way. A distributed project can run at an exaFLOPS rate and still do no productive work, if the participants never finish any of the work they are tasked with.
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surely the expense of exascale couldn't be justified merely because of a data transfer limitation for clustering and boinc.
boinc is enjoying organic growth in performance, including in data transfer rates, with upgrading of consumer hardware and telco infrastructure, and scientific organisations can access this power at a fraction of the cost of establishing a supercomputing facility.
the other bottleneck is I/O, and this will not change with exascale. sensors can on
Re:Help Me Understand? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the applications on big supercomputers are simulations. In the basic case, each node sits there simulating it's cube of atmosphere, or its bit of the airflow around an aircraft or car design or its bit of a nuclear weapon in a simulated warehouse fire. Every time-step it needs to exchange the state of the borders of it's region with its neighbour nodes. In some other applications, all the nodes are working together to invert a huge matrix or do a massive Fourier transform in several dimensions. These need even more communication.
The demand is genuine, and can't be met by wide-area distributed computing using any algorithms we know.
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Re:Help Me Understand? (Score:4, Informative)
Why is everyone pushing for exascale computing?
Well, we all want more computing power.
What is such a super computer used for?
Soliving very large systems of linear equations (for one). Many (but by no means all) scientific problems come down on the inside to solving linear systems over and over again. Basically, anything that can be described by partial differential equations.
Sometimes people want to find eigen decompositions of them too.
But there's also things like molecular dynamics, etc, etc.
Couldn't a massive distributed system work just as well?
Yes: that's exactly what supercomputers are these days. They're usually a collection of decent to very good CPUs (BlueGene series aside) in a bunch of 4p rack mount boxes with a top-end network.
The key generally in the network, which allows micorsecond latency communication between neighbouring nodes.
The nature of exactly what networking works well is very dependent on the problem.
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Why is everyone pushing for exascale computing? What is such a super computer used for? Couldn't a massive distributed system work just as well?
No, not for what they really intend such a system for.
How exactly do you think that the governments are going to perform threat/intelligence analysis of all that data, video, and audio they're collecting both on the internet and from all the CCTV cams, cellphones, and those 30,000 new government drones that will be patrolling the US domestic skies, especially with all the recent data-retention and snooping laws nearly all the Western governments have been, or trying to, implement? Especially for analysis do
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You just present a point of view in the most light and easy to read way. Ever tried comedy? (no joke here)
It is true that such supercomputers could be used to analyze huge amounts of data regarding activities of the civilians. And this is both amazing and scary. Amazing because we've got far enough that we have the data AND the power to process it in a timely manner; scary because of what could be done with the results of such analysis. I understand the pros and cons of the government (or any company or ind
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You just present a point of view in the most light and easy to read way. Ever tried comedy? (no joke here)
Seriously, thanks! Comes from decades of playing in club/bar bands and having to keep crowds entertained in between sets/songs/broken-string-replacements/equipment failures/band changes/etc. The ability to make people laugh is a matter of survival when playing a gig in a bar-full of drunk & rowdy patched-up outlaw bikers, where the smallest biker still resembles Mongo's bigger and angrier brother packing a semi-auto pistol.
Apparently, however, someone with mod points doesn't appreciate my sense of humor
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More waste (Score:1, Insightful)
Such government "grand" plans are good to distract the crowds, entertain the peons, and prop politicians and their friend's pet projects and corporations up. But the fact that such project requires forcing people to "invest" in them is proof that these resources are misaligned to the current needs and preferences of the people.
I'm sure that we'll get to exascale at some point, but trying to push it too early (before investors find ways to fund it voluntarily) means wasted opportunities. Unfortunately, as Ba
Re:More waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Definition of Exascale Computing (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't know what it was, I don't follow supercomputing very closely. I looked it up. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exascale_computing [wikipedia.org]
"Exascale computing refers to computing capabilities beyond the currently existing petascale. If achieved, it would represent a thousandfold increase over that scale."
To define Petascale:
"In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petascale [wikipedia.org]
A Petascale computer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar can do 1.75 petaflops. To reach an exaflop, it would require almost 6000 installations of this supercomputer.
So yeah, Exaflop is pretty big. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(computing) [wikipedia.org]
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A Petascale computer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar can do 1.75 petaflops. To reach an exaflop, it would require almost 6000 installations of this supercomputer.
6000 times 1.75 petaflops would be 10.5 exaflops, surely. I think you mean 600 installations.
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i figure it will be like driving a Ferrari in a traffic jam
Re:Definition of Exascale Computing (Score:4, Funny)
but what can any single machine that can achieve it actually be used for?
i figure it will be like driving a Ferrari in a traffic jam
I believe the meme you are looking for is "play Crysis at full resolution".
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Simulating the airflow over a new car, plane or rocket design.
Weather forecasting
Simulating biochemical networks
etc.
See http://www.nccs.gov/wp-content/media/nccs_reports/Science%20Case%20_012808%20v3__final.pdf [nccs.gov]
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Not really necessary in the US (Score:3)
The US is awash in privately funded technology R&D toward exascale computing. While there is government funding, it is somewhat superfluous to the extent that US has a huge, well-funded private sector obsessed with massively scaling just about everything vaguely related to computing. That whole Internet-scale computing thing.
The US is hardly disadvantaged by the government not spending money on exascale computing. The US government does not need to compensate for the absence of private investment.
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The US is hardly disadvantaged by the government not spending money on exascale computing. The US government does not need to compensate for the absence of private investment.
It's not so much the absence of private investment, as it is the absence of a cohesive direction for all that private investment.
Through either funding or regulation, the government can focus private investment in constructive ways in order to achieve national priorities.
Of course, the free marketeers don't like such ideas, but if they get their way, we'll be buying our solutions from China.
Just like we now have to buy all our rare earth minerals from China.
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The US is awash in privately funded technology R&D toward exascale computing. While there is government funding, it is somewhat superfluous to the extent that US has a huge, well-funded private sector obsessed with massively scaling just about everything vaguely related to computing. That whole Internet-scale computing thing.
This. Huge.
A billion dollars can be a single contract for a large scale server farm/cluster in the US. Rare, yes, but, imagine, that can be a single contract between only two companies. If you think one of the companies isn't trying to make their product faster/better than the other guy, you're nuts.
Intel in 2010 spent over 6 billion dollars [tellingtechtales.com] in R&D alone. You think none of that was to become faster?
I named the biggest (probably), but, that's just one of a LOT of companies. The nations spending on t
Re:The problem with Europe is they are duplicators (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The problem with Europe is they are duplicators (Score:4, Insightful)
most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones
Boeing was actually a partner in the A380 project at one point, but it bailed and started the Dreamliner. I bet they're still sulking about that decision.
The only project Europe can be commended on is ITER
the only other thing they contributed to was maybe was European settlement of the west (what is now the United States), but that doesn't really matter I guess; I’m sure the native Indian population would have eventually established NASA, NIF, etc anyway
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I’m sure the native Indian population would have eventually established NASA, NIF, etc anyway
If people descended from those who crossed the Bering Strait to settle North America are 'natives', then certainly so are people descended from those who crossed the Atlantic.
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I know it wasn't your point, it was just a good place from which to troll. And you pretty much answered your question with the wikipedia link below. I haven't looked much into it. I just remember the basics of the theory. They must have come from somewhere though, unless homo sapiens developed in N. America independent from development in Africa.
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Re:The problem with Europe is they are duplicators (Score:5, Informative)
Let's go through your examples: .. a weak form of NASA"
"NASA went to space, so Europe made the ESA
Ok, the ESA has got nothing on NASA (no surprise since its total funding it sadly only about 1/5th what NASA gets). But the only reason NASA was able to get to the moon so quickly back in the day was that it 'stole' German rocket technology and scientists after the war. Everything NASA's done since then has been based on developments on the rocket technology it got from Germany after the war.
"The US starting building the supercollider (which Reagan cancelled) so they built the LHC -- a weaker supercollider ... they only win cause supercollider funding got cut"
Nonsense, the LHC is a machine that is literally *the edge* of what current science and technology can do, which is why it's taken so long to get it working. You can't compare that to a collider that was cancelled 20 years ago due to being unrealisticly expensive to build.
"The US has Boeing so Europee made Airbus -- most of their planes are uninspired boeing clones"
Airbus pioneered the use technologies like fly-by-wire and composite fuselages long before Boeing dared. They've also introduced new aircraft that change the economics on certain routes such as the A380. Not to mention that the first commercial jetliner in production was the deHavilland Comet from the UK, although it proved unsafe and was eventually overtaken by the American 707.
"The US built the National Ignition Facility to study nuclear fusion, so Europe is building Laser Megajoule"
The NIF and ITER are two different approaches to achieving viable nuclear fusion, Europe has commited the majority of its funding to the ITER approach but it'd be stupid not to have some smaller scale experiments which use the approach that NIF uses. Just as I'm sure the US has some experiments that try the ITER torus approach.
Oh and BTW the National Ignition Facility was 5 years behind schedule and almost 4 times more expensive than originally budgeted when completed.
There are areas of scient and technology where the US is ahead and some where Europe is, but it's always annoying in those discussions to have some jingoistic American spread around the myth that all technological development comes from the US and Europe (and everyone else) are just copiers. It's a myth not supported by history, including not by recent history.
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The US built the National Ignition Facility to study nuclear fusion, so Europe is building Laser Megajoule
The NIF and ITER are two different approaches to achieving viable nuclear fusion, Europe has commited the majority of its funding to the ITER approach but it'd be stupid not to have some smaller scale experiments which use the approach that NIF uses. Just as I'm sure the US has some experiments that try the ITER torus approach.
Mégajoule (MJ) is not primarily motivated by fusion as a public energy source (although it will be used for research on that too, on the side) but by military considerations. Now that live nuclear weapon testing has been banned, ensuring proper operation of nukes can only be achieved through simulation and such tests facilities as the NIF and MJ. That's really why both were created. And by the way, MJ is not a European project but a French one: nuclear deterrence is at national level only, Europe is no
Re:The problem with Europe is they are duplicators (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA went to space...
... using the expertise of a bunch of German rocket scientists.
The US has Boeing...
... thanks to the jet engine, invented by a Brit.
America's special talent seems to be taking inventions from others and making them fit for mass consumption(*). But I'm not so sure they're the great innovators you claim they are.
(*) A trend that was curiously reversed with the Internet and the World Wide Web.
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NASA went to space...
... using the expertise of a bunch of German rocket scientists.
...and chased there by the Soviets (first artificial satellite, first animal in orbit (though not the first in space), first man in space and first EVA).
Europe's research emphasizes other Topics (Score:3)
I assume a "+1 funny" as otherwise I'd have to assume that you're oblivious to the numerous scientific contributions for which Europeans have received recognitions like the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal. You've got a point though: research around the globe is tightly coupled and so the funded projects resemble each other. You could add Japan to the mix. Their K computer isn't just a copy of some IBM BlueGene or such. And it's currently the fastest machine, at least until BlueGene/Q results are in.
Europe o
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pre-Franklin intellectuals (Score:2)
Most of the really competent scientist in the US are foreign-born and have always been.
As for copying it has been a give and take for the few decades the US has had any intellectuals at all.
How many pre-Franklin intellectuals can you recall? Where were they born?
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Welcome to 3rd World America (Score:5, Insightful)
We have no ability to put humans in space.
We no longer host any major sub-atomic research facility. The generation after the CERN will not be in the US. We're not even in the running.
The next big ground based radio telescope will not be in the US.
The NASA planetary exploration budget is being diverted to fund private launch companies. If there was a viable economic model for space transport, then private sector equity funding would be available. It's not. Many of the commercial space ventures are funded by individuals who made fortunes in software (Musk, Carmac, Bezos, Allen. Branson, but in music and transportation), Wall Street is not betting on making money in the launch sector. Putting NASA money into launch ventures is not basic science R&D.
We are, however teaching creationism and climate change denial in schools. Most of the Republican presidential candidates are anti-evolution. Santorum just said that he is "pro-science", and the Democrats are anti-science. This is clearly in 1984 territory: Ignorance Is Strength.
Most Slashdot readers will experience the slide into 3rd world status during the course of their lives.
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With regard to the radiotelescope, the US doesn't have any suitable noise free sites. There's a reason that the SKA is being placed in the least populated part of the least populated continent on the planet. Most of the equipment for the telescope is going to be Intel Inside.
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With regard to the radiotelescope, the US doesn't have any suitable noise free sites.
It's also in the northern hemisphere, which has already been well studied. Yet the majority of really interesting objects (notably including the center of our galaxy) are in the southern sky. There's no particular reason for this — it's pure happenstance — but it does mean that we want a good radiotelescope well south of the equator. (To be fair, Hawaii's probably far enough south for many of the interesting targets and the ocean surrounding it really isn't that radio-noisy, but it's not large e
Bullshit doomism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just address one point:
We have no ability to put humans in space.
Temporarily, because we have MULTIPLE private companies working to that end. In just a few years we'll have multiple private companies that can put way more people in space than any government ever has, a far superior situation to be in.
Do not mistake transition for defeat.
Re:Welcome to 3rd World America (Score:4, Insightful)
You know what's worse about this?
The fact that it matters to you.
The US doesn't need to be the best at everything to be a good country to live in. You should be happy of technological improvement wherever it happens.
Re:Welcome to 3rd World America (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".
Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.
First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism. I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity. We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.
Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.
In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA. The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.
Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.
In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million. US fatalities were approximately 500,000. Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.
The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination. US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland. (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.) But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere. Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.
For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.
In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy. Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant. Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism. Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for
Did anybody else (Score:2)
calculating wheather and eartquakes (Score:2)
From the article:
"As for China, 'the Chinese are very practical in this regard,' said Joseph. 'They are very interested in how they use their machines to make their industries stronger.'"
LOL
This fits my picture of Europe, US and Japan calculating wheather, eartquakes and nuclear explosions, while the Chinese let their industry sector use it to improve their products.
Exascale computing: DNS of flow around airfoil (Score:3, Informative)
Resolving the turbulent flow around an airfoil with a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS, i.e., without a turbulent model) requires an exascale computer in order to be practical (i.e. only take some weeks).
At the moment there is a whole science of creating turbulence models for approximating turbulence behavior. However, because turbulence is one of the most important unresolved problems of classical mechanics, none of the models work in all cases, and in some cases, none work.
We are still far from having "exascale on the desktop" but some practical DNS simulations will give a lot of insight into turbulence, allowing us to develop better turbulence models with the corresponding improvements in energy efficiency (e.g. aerodynamics, combustion, lubrication,... for applications in combustion engines, wind turbines, cars, trains, ships, airplanes, weather forecasting...).
So? (Score:2)
They'll be running Windows.
Nvidia is on its way to exascale (Score:1)