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."
This is how a superpower dies (Score:5, Insightful)
If another country starts to outshine you, try changing the rules.
America's strength used lie in an immense manufacturing culture, and that's given way to "intellectual property". Instead of dealing with tangibles, America is content to sit behind a desk and let the Chinese labour.
True to an extent (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really need to crunch a lot of numbers and are willing to spend a lot to do it, it often makes more sense to develop an ASIC or FPGA type solution. I know the EFF put together a key cracking system for $250,000 that would probably still blow modern supercomputers out of the water for that specific application.
Re:This is how a superpower dies (Score:4, Insightful)
No. It's creating more fear of the outside World: terrorism, other countries "attacking" us, others getting "ahead" of us, an infinitum.
Nuclear war and the Soviets are gone. Our leaders need other bogeymen - their version of "Goldstein" - to keep us in fear. Because those of us who have been educated outside of the corporate system - any type of education that doesn't train one for a vocation - fear is how you control the little people. Apparently the scare of terrorists and Muslims aren't enough.
Re:This is how a superpower dies (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, eventually it will all come crashing down and we'll all get a rude awakening, but until that happens, I do not think anyone will want to change the current system.
It's not the supercomputer, it's the software (Score:5, Insightful)
The "race" is not about the hardware. All modern supercomputers are massively clustered, using various shared memory architectures. The technology is commodity level, and even a small sum like $10 million can buy a SHITLOAD of hardware. The challenge, and the point of competition, is the creation of software technologies and algorithms to effectively make use of clustered hardware. It's a question of who has the best minds working on the software. The hardware is a given. People have constructed impressive massively parallel processors using game consoles, after all.
It's the programmers, not the supercomputer makers, who will make the difference in this "race."
Re:And while we're at it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is how a superpower dies (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not "intellectual property", the problem is service economy. Manufacturing, no matter what you're producing, be it cars or blueprints for them, creates value. Service jobs don't. That's why they pay so badly. As economy increasingly gets all of its growth from services, rather than industry, the amount of stuff - also known as wealth - circulating does not grow. That is why we are seeing so much economic problems.
The Western world is de-industrializing as all manufacturing jobs are moved to China, and design jobs are following since few people can actually do them well. We are simply returning to the pre-industrial situation where the only ones who have significant amount of wealth are the nobles, and they are so much richer than everyone else that they have a practical monopoly on power as well. Whether this was by design or by accident I can't say, but whichever the reason, the increasing poverty and destruction of Western civilization is in the best interests of our overlords, so it will continue.
Oh well, another few millenias under ruthless Chinese dictators. When they take over I at least hope they reward our traitors as a traitor deserves. A pity for the children, thought; good thing I don't have them.
Re:How a Superpower Rules (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason the US was overtaken in this particular metric is that the US is no longer devoting resources to being at the top of it, because those resources go into being top in the other metrics that actually do matter. The Chinese moved into the top spot after it ceased to be the most important.
This report is advising the president not to be tricked into wasting resources competing with China in that less important category at the expense of retaining leadership in the other categories.
The US doesn't build the tallest skyscrapers anymore, because we built an even bigger suburban infrastructure around cities, making such density less valuable. Other countries that do build the world's tallest building (for a while) are either wasting their time, or competing in an unnecessary race the US has no real value anymore in winning.
The US has a largely transparent government, and this advice from an advisory group to the president is good advice. Far better to compete in what matters, and to tell the truth about why. If the president were in the critical path to building the tallest buildings, the focus away from them to other development patterns would have become better known, though just as aptly practiced.
The people who misunderstand this report and the US compliance with it are not important in the supercomputer industry. Just as people who whine that the US doesn't have the world's tallest buildings anymore aren't important to the construction industry.