Towards a High PerformanceComputing Economy:Blue Collar Computing

Presented by:

Stanley C. Ahalt, Ph.D.Ohio Supercomputer Center

Pittsburgh, PA November 6 – 12, 2004

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IntroductionCommercial Forces Influence Technology

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Example: The Automobile Market

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Today’s Automotive Market

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Today: commercialization of high-performance computing

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The IT Sector must influence HPC!

• From 1993 to 2000, IT added 1.8 million jobs.

• Between 2000 and 2002 IT lost 600,000 jobs.

• In 2003 IT equipment sector up 16.7 percent

•In 2004 top 500 companies estimate average of $369 million spent on IT.

• In 2004 U.S. federal government estimate $59 billion spent on IT.

• Federal IT spending expected to grow at 6.6 percent, reaching $81 billion by 2009

Sources: The Digital Economy Fact Book, Information Week, and INPUT.

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A Growing Awareness of HPC’s importance as a competitive tool

July 2004 COC/IDC Survey of 33 CIO/CTOs:

• Over 70% indicated their companies could not function without HPC;

• Over 25% of companies could quantify HPC’s ROI to their businesses:

- saved millions of dollars, or

- shortened production development cycles, or

- provided faster product-to-market timing.

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Joseph Gardner: HPC as a critical tool

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But industrial adoption of HPC lags…

From the same Council on Competitiveness IDC report:

• 65% of the reporting companies have important, but currently unsolved computational problems;

• 35% need faster computers for their problems

HPC has the potential to impact:• Workforce productivity• Engineering design• Manufacturing

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Giorgio Rizzoni: HPC use in automotive industry.

Pete Buca: HPC is integrated part of some industries.

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Barriers to HPC entry• Workforce

• Intellectual Property

• ROI

• Culture clashes

• Imagination

• Tools

High performance computing gives you the ability to include additional information into the model that may have an impact on the long-term outlook of that product or service. It just gives you a more accurate reading of where that product or service will be twenty, thirty, forty years down the road. -Brandt Barlow

IT Solutions Architect, Nationwide Services Co.

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Workforce Issues: Lack of HPC Skills

• Deficit of technical expertise among existing and emerging workforce

• Need for sophisticated computational science curricula

• Educational programs cater to the NOW, not the future

“The problems that need to be solved nowadays often require individuals with multidisciplinary experience and that is precisely what computational science education strives to achieve.” - Leigh J. Little Prof., Computational Science, SUNY Brockport

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A Few Standouts in Education

• Some Universities have degree programs• Graduate programs (36)• Undergraduate programs (6)

• Some have minors or Certificate programs• Most are adds or minors rather than full integration• Some are trying to do it right

• Capital University

• Undergraduate and community college efforts • The Shodor Education Foundation, funded by NSF and Burroughs

Wellcome, created the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI)

“… there has been a lack of an effective language to communicate new ideas and results in computational science. This is in part due to the diversity of the computational science community.” -

Ken Wilson (1982 Nobel Prize winner in Physics )

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The importance of Computational Science to University faculty, High School teachers, and…

… to high school students!

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Forecast for Software Engineers: Good “Computer software engineers will be among the ten

fastest growing occupations over the decade between 2002 and 2012, with those focusing on applications growing by 46 percent and those in systems software growing by 45 percent.”

-Bureau of Labor Statistics

Forecast for Computational Scientists: Excellent!"One of my students combined his studies in the computational science program at Capital University with a finance degree, then received a master's degree in computational finance at Carnegie Mellon.  After over 10 offers from New York city firms mostly, he came back to Ohio to work for American Electric Power in Cincinnati, with all of his college loans paid and a starting salary of $96,000 per year.”

-Ignatios Vakalis, Capital Univ., Nov. , 2004

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Other Barriers…• Intellectual Property – security and confidentiality• ROI calculations

• Because of the short term goals of industry, HPC can appear unattractive because the rewards of HPC are longer-term

• Culture clashes between industrial and HPC communities• Industry viewpoint: Speed, quality, cost – pick two• Academic and Government viewpoint: Grand Challenges

• A lack of experience, and therefore imagination, with HPC

“High performance computing gives you the ability to include additional information into the model that may have an impact  on the long-term outlook of that product or service.  It just gives you a more accurate reading of where that product or service will be twenty, thirty, forty years down the road.” - Brandt Barlow, IT Solutions Architect, Nationwide Financial Services Co.

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Tools – The Biggest Barrier• GUI made desktop computing

broadly accessible, and,• Web browsers made networking

popular.• HPC hardware and software are

hard to use, but,• HPC companies have little

reason to forge new tools and utilities, although

• Industry needs to tackle more complex models in a much wider context,

• Cost of developing HPC tools versus other business investments is problematic….

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Computation Science Wizard

• Modeling and simulation require expertise• Standard models could be codified• Novices could use standardized tools while experts

push the envelope

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Refocusing HPC: Usability and Productivity

• HPC industry has benefited from bigger memory chips, faster switching speeds, and far greater storage capacity

• Usability of HPC software HAS NOT TRACKED the improvements in hardware.

There are some hopeful signs:• The European Union plans to spend $63 million into

universities and research labs to make grid computing work for industrial projects.

• “Expert makes move from U.S. to China to lead supercomputing effort” The Chinese government is seizing upon supercomputing to help speed the nation's transition from low-cost manufacturing to becoming a more powerful force in the world economy.

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High End of the Spectrum

• Grand Challenges bring federal resources and funds to bear on high-end computational problems, for example:• Astrophysics• Computational biology/Life

Sciences• Condensed matter physics• Nanoscale materials• Aerospace vehicles

• Solutions to Grand Challenges usually represent several orders of magnitude improvement over previous capabilities

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A “typical” job distribution at OSC

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A Proposed Goal: Full-Spectrum HPC, aka, “Blue Collar Computing™”

• Full spectrum focus – from small jobs to large jobs.

• Large jobs of today must become small jobs tomorrow

• Need scalable applications – scale up AND scale down!

• Industrial application focus

• Emphasis on productivity

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Amount of Computing Power

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# of Dollars

Current Market for HPC

Easy Pickings

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, Storage , & CapabilityDoD

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Competitive NecessityBusiness ROIProgrammer Productivity

NSF DoE

Heroes

Ideal Market for HPC

Blue-Collar HPC

IncreasedProductivity Gains

In Industry and Engineering Increased

Gains inScientific Discovery

Blue-Collar Computing

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Blue Collar(High-Performance) Computing

The goals of Blue Collar Computing:• Move the bulk of everyday research,

science, and engineering tasks from single-processor desktops to everyday HPC platforms.

• Drive the use of parallel computing into the mainstream of computing!

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Leslie Southern on Blue Collar Computing

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Is the time right for Blue Collar Computing?

Absolutely!

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Reason 1: Large, forward thinking firms already making investments

• Use HPC for production and process design• Use simulation to save money and time• Improve product quality with virtual prototypes

“Because we have not had high performance computing in the past, and because the models are very complex and take a long time to run, our actuaries try to skinny down the models.  That means that the results might not be as accurate as you would like them to be.” - Brandt Barlow, IT Solutions Architect, Nationwide Services Co.

“We are significantly expanding capabilities in computational modeling and computer-aided engineering, so we can do an increasing percentage of product and process design through virtual simulation.”

- A.G. Lafley, President and CEO, Procter & Gamble

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Irene Qualters: HPC’s role in drug design

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Reason 2: Democratization of HPC

HPC hardware is becoming more ... Personal.

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Multi-Core MicroprocessorsTwo factors:• Physics: heat dissipation increasingly difficult.• Economics: production yields increasingly

problematic. “A Split at the Core”, by W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, November, 2004

Are compelling microprocessor manufacturers to offer multi-core (2,4,8, 16,…?) microprocessors.

• IBM• Hewlett-Packard• Sun• Intel• AMD

Issues:•Costs/Licenses:

•Number of cores?•Number of processors?•Number of sockets? •Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, IBM, BEA, AMD

•Virtualization•Software

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High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF)

DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS)

Reason 3: Momentum

Workshop on High-Productivity Languages and Models (Hans Zima)

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How to accelerate the Blue-Collar revolution

A public-private partnership: The HPC Software Institute- Shared investments- Shared benefits

An increased focus on highly reliable, sustained software, high-productivity languages, and HPC tools- Common software methods- Sustain research tools long enough to allow

them to become viable in the marketplace

A new emphasis on Computational Science curricula at all levels, that is, K-16- All undergrads should be exposed to

computational science and engineering- AP courses should be made available for wide

distribution at the high school level

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Griorgio Rizzoni: HPC in automotive industry

Add fastest electric car picture!

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Pete admonishes us to use HPC to “Think Faster”

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Conclusions• A fundamental shift in our industry is underway – a shift to

Blue Collar HPC. The shift is inevitable, but can be accelerated.• Blue Collar HPC will move everyday research, science, and

engineering tasks from the desktop onto everyday HPC platforms.

• Eventually, parallel computing will become the dominant form of mainstream computing!

• The entire spectrum of the HPC industry will reap the benefit – including the very highest end of the spectrum.

• This shift is compelled by:• Industrial needs and receptivity• Technology changes• Criticality of computational science to the many complex problems we face

today

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