White House Warns of Supercomputer Arms Race 123
dcblogs writes "The White House's science advisors, in a report last week, said a petaflop-by-petaflop race to achieve number one on the Top500 could prove costly and divert money from supercomputing research. 'While it would be imprudent to allow ourselves to fall significantly behind our peers with respect to scientific performance benchmarks that have demonstrable practical significance, a single-minded focus on maintaining clear superiority in terms of flops count is probably not in our national interest,' the report said (PDF). It is urging the supercomputing community to expand its benchmark measures beyond the Top500's Linpack. It says the Graph500, for data-intensive applications involving the rapid execution of graph operations, 'will be more relevant,' but also acknowledges that it will difficult to rely on any one measure."
How a Superpower Rules (Score:5, Informative)
The advice to the president doesn't change rules for "fastest supercomputer". It tells the president not to be suckered into a supercomputer race measured on only the FLOPS, but rather on more useful performance measures. Because getting sidetracked into less useful metrics to see who's winning the race will waste US resources in winning the race, but not producing the most useful computer. And the US interest is in producing the most useful computer, not in nominally winning the race.
In fact, that report says "let China dominate the Top500, if the US still has the better computers". Which is exactly what I want the US doing, and what I prefer China to be doing rather than leaving the US behind in actual usefulness.
But if you want to get caught up in "the USA is dead" trip that leads into traps that actually would hurt the US if acted on, go ahead. You're not having any effect on the US supercomputer effort.