Towards a High Performance
Computing Economy:
Blue Collar Computing
Presented by:
Stanley C. Ahalt, Ph.D.
Ohio Supercomputer Center
Pittsburgh, PA
November 6 – 12, 2004
Introduction
Commercial 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 highperformance 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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Ideal Market for HPC
Number of Applications
Number of Tasks
Number of Users
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Blue-Collar Computing
Blue-Collar HPC
Increased
Productivity Gains
In Industry and
Engineering
Easy Pickings
Competitive Necessity
Business ROI
Programmer Productivity
Increased
Gains in
Scientific Discovery
Current Market
for HPC
Heroes
1 2
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64
DoD NSF DoE
Amount of Computing Power , Storage , & Capability
# of Dollars
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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 Microprocessors
Two 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
Issues:
• Hewlett-Packard
•Costs/Licenses:
• Sun
•Number of cores?
•Number of processors?
• Intel
•Number of sockets?
• AMD
•Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, IBM,
BEA, AMD
•Virtualization
•Software
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DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS)
Workshop on HighProductivity Languages
and Models (Hans Zima)
High-End Computing
Revitalization Task Force
(HECRTF)
Reason 3:
Momentum
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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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