1) the nature of the supercomputer business; 2) its importance; 3 ...€¦ · 25-02-1988 ·...

* i 7538Y - Draft #6-FCONGRESSIONAL ECONOMIC LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE - 2/25/88R. M. Price

INTRODUCTION

I welcome this opportunity to talk about supercomputers—the alpha

and omega of high technology.

Most of us have some idea of what a supercomputer is I think it's

appropriate to begin with a definition.

If you were to ask the engineers and scientists who work with

supercomputers for a definition, they would probably say: "A

supercomputer is just below what we currently need."

A less whimsical and more pragmatic definition is: A supercomputer

is the most powerful computer available at any given state of

computer technology.

Today I would like to discuss four aspects of supercomputers:

1) The nature of the supercomputer business; 2) Its importance;

3) Parallelism and the growth in computing power; and, 4) Actions

the U.S. government can take to help ensure continued American

superiority in supercomputing.

R M Price CDC speeches Charles Babbage Institute <www.cbi.umn.edu>

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THE HIGH-RISK NATURE OF SUPERCOMPUTERS

The most significant characteristic — in fact probably the only

one — to remember about the nature of this business is high

risk — very high risk. Supercomputers are the highest risk part

of the high risk computer industry because they involve both

extraordinary technical risks and commercial risks.

Since supercomputers are the highest performance machines for any

given state of technology, the technical risk may seem obvious.

But the risk goes far beyond that. In building the most powerful

system possible there is an extremely subtle balance that must be

struck between architecture and circuit technology. In

oversimplified terms this is because the design of a supercomputer

takes roughly four years. So, you are aiming at a point four

years out. Trying to anticipate the state of technology that far

out, can lead and has led to an absolute dead end. On the other

hand, working only with proven technology will almost surely

preclude the successful implementation of advanced architectural

concepts.

Moreover, any design that truly moves out the frontiers of

computing will require new software. That compounds the already

great hardware risk.


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As to the commercial risk, to recover development costs, a company

must be able to sell into the world market. Access to that market

for supercomputers is obviously a political as well as an economic

matter. Also, because of procurement cycles, development delays

are highly leveraged in terms of available market windows. The

past is replete with examples of all this technical and commercial

risk and failure.

The supercomputer story really begins with the efforts of IBM and

Univac in the middle 1950's, which produced computers known as the

LARC (for the Lawrence Livermore Lab) and the STRETCH (for Los

Alamos). LARC and STRETCH were shared risk developments, with the

government contracting in advance for the machines. The vendors1

risks involved agreeing to a fixed price and guarantee of

completion of the contract. Both these early projects suffered

from the soon to be familiar experience in supercomputer

development of underestimating complexity and technological

challenges. Although in both cases something was finally

delivered, both attempts can only be labeled as financial

disasters.

The unquestioned beginning of supercomputers as a distinct class

came in 1964 with the delivery of the initial Control Data 6600

computers. It was in connection with this event that the term

"supercomputer" actually first came into use. The great success


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of the 6600 has obscured a crucial matter. It was designed

twice. Seymour Cray, who worked for Control Data at the time,

misjudged in trying to anticipate circuit technology. The

development flopped. He had to start over.

Also lost in the mists of the past is that even when the

successful design was completed, the machine couldn't be produced

in any volume and ultimately it was, in effect, designed a 3rd

time. On top of that, its design peculiarities were such that the

most common customer complaint for the first five years of its

existence was that its software yielded only 30-40% of its

potential power.

Nevertheless, the supercomputer era was launched. The realization

of computational rates in the "megaflop" range led immediately to

demands by high energy physicists for even greater horsepower.

With the potential of the 6600 barely digested, the government

labs set forth needs which led to more advanced designs involving

"multiprocessors" and "vector processors." Out of this effort

came the Texas Instruments "Advanced Scientific Computer"

development, the Burroughs "Illiac IV" and the Control Data

"Star-100" projects. The hope of developers and customers alike

was that these machines would be available as early as 1970-71.

Such was not to be the case.


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Meanwhile at Control Data, Seymour was also designing a new

machine — the 6800. The machine was to be a compatible extension

of the 6600 and four times faster. It too failed. Once again it

was necessary to start over and by using a different design —

incompatible with the 6600 — the desired performance was

achieved. But, because of the incompatability, the software costs

were enormous.

This redesigned 6800 was called the 7600 and enjoyed an

extraordinarily long run as the world's most powerful computer.

The reason for that longevity was that the TI-ASC effort failed

and was abandoned. The ILLIAC-IV failed and was abandoned. The

STAR-100 failed and was redesigned, redesigned, and redesigned

again until finally in 1979, the Cyber 205 appeared. It hardly

seems necessary to remind you that hundreds of millions of dollars

were involved in all this.

In those same years Seymour's own effort to build the follow-on to

the 7600 — a machine to be called the 8600 — had also failed.

Again the problem was the circuit technology selection. But this

time the selection was too conservative rather than too

ambitious. At that point Seymour left Control Data and a year or

so later established Cray Research. Having learned from the 8600

experience, he produced the imminently successful CRAY-1.


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By the start of the 80's, after 10-12 years of effort, the

"radical" vector and multi and parallel processing architectures

began to take hold with the advent of the CRAY XMP, and more

recently the ETA-10 and a variety of less capable machines.

I have dwelt on this history at some length only to emphasize the

point I made at the beginning. In supercomputer development,

there have been more failures than successes. To date, every

successful machine, except the Cray XMP and the ETA-10, has been

designed at least twice before it succeeded. (I can't speak to

the Japanese experience).

The U.S. lead in supercomputers has been established, then, not

only by the technical expertise of some truly remarkable people

but equally by management perseverance and very enlightened

cooperation between government and industry.

The technical and marketing risks make the supercomputing industry

similar to the aerospace industry. The analogy can be carried

even further. The cost to design, develop and manufacture a new

generation supercomputer is roughly the same as the cost to

design, develop and manufacture a new fighter aircraft. Both

industries are a critical part of America's defense system.


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Now, imagine what would happen if the official position of the

U.S. government toward the aerospace industry was: "We need an

airplane. Why don't you spend $200 million to develop one? If we

like it, we might buy some."

No company would build an airplane. So, the government routinely

funds not only the companies they buy aircraft from but also

others to compete with them so they are not at the mercy of any

one supplier.

The risk in the supercomputer industry can be reduced in the same

way. Government would guarantee the purchase of a number of

supercomputers as an investment in national defense. The

guarantee, of course, is contingent on a product that performs to

specification.

But this is assured from the beginning. Just as the American

aerospace industry knows how to build airplanes, the U.S.

supercomputer industry knows how to build supercomputers. We've

learned the hard way through a quarter of a century of experience.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPERCOMPUTERS

Why is all this so important to U.S. competitiveness and general

economic health?


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I opened my remarks by calling supercomputers the alpha and omega

of high technology. They are not only the ultimate embodiment of

the most advanced electronics technology; they are in fact the

driving force behind new advances across a broad spectrum of

technologies.

Indeed, supercomputers are equally, if not more important, in the

technological advances they spawn as they are in their role as

engines of computation. Those advances ultimately find their way

into the mainstream of computers from mainframes to workstations

and personal computers.

For the sake of time I won't give you a litany of the

architectural concepts, semi-conductor devices, packaging and

cooling technologies that have been generated and come into common

use as a result of the desire to produce the highest possible

level of computing performance. But no matter where you look

across the computer industry you find technology and processes

spawned a decade or more ago by supercomputer development.

The role of the supercomputer as the engine of technological

advance, however, goes far beyond the computer and semiconductor

industries.


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As they are applied to problems at the frontiers of knowledge in

other disciplines, these computers speed the advance of technology

in aerospace, automotive, biotechnology, petroleum and many other

industries.

Weather modeling was one of the earliest applications to which

supercomputers were applied. Each advance in computing capability

has given rise to more advanced mathematical weather models, but

the need is still greater than any existing or planned

supercomputer can fulfill.

In a recent survey of U.S. professional airplane pilots, a major

safety concern was better weather information, especially wind

shear. Many pilots consider wind shear a more serious problem

than overcrowding in the skies.

There are many other such examples I could cite. But what it

comes down to is this: the nation that leads in information

processing technology is destined to be the competitive leader in

world trade, it will be the nation that generates new ideas in

research sciences from high energy physics to genetic

engineering, it will be the nation that is capable of producing

new advances in military technology; and it will be the nation

that brings more new products to market.


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As I said, supercomputers are both the alpha and omega of high

technology.

PARALLELISM AND GROWTH IN COMPUTING POWER

On that note, let me turn to parallel computing. The recent media

attention given this topic would lead you to believe that

computers until now were all based on an architecture not

involving parallelism; that those of the future will be; that we

have reached a watershed in computing.

Nothing could be more misleading. The Von-Neuman computer concept

in no way dictates the number of things going on in a computer at

the same time. The entire history of computer design is one of

increasing parallelism or more accurately stated, concurrency.

There are only two ways to increase the effective speed of a

computer: one is faster circuits, the other is greater

concurrency — i.e. having more things going on at the same time.

The limiting constraints on the former are physical — ultimately

the speed of light itself. The constraint on the latter is

increasing complexity of control. It's very straightforward —

the more things that are going on simultaneously the harder it is

to assure that they are helping one another or at least not

hindering one another.


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Anyone chairing a large committee understands the problem.

Almost at the beginning of computer history someone observed that

while a computer is working on one instruction, it might as well

be getting ready for another instruction. Next, someone noted

that you might as well be fetching the data for the following

instruction while working on the one before.

Over time, more sophisticated versions of data fetch and

instruction staging evolved, giving rise to now familiar design

concepts such as multiple functional units, vector processing and

multiple processors.

But to illustrate the crucial point — complexity of control —

let me consider parallelism by comparing different ways of mowing

your lawn.

Without using any parallelism, you could simply hire one person

with one lawnmower to do the job. But you have a large lawn and

it will take one person four hours. To shorten the time, you

could contract with four people to do the job — one person for

each side of your house. The control is simple: "A" mows front,

"B" mows back, "C" mows left side, "D" mows right side. In this

case, you have used parallel processing to reduce the time to mow

your lawn from four hours to one.


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Let's push this method and hire 240 people to mow the lawn. Can

you expect the job will be done in one minute?

Not exactly. The problem is you must spend a lot of time

contacting each of these people and telling them what to do so

that they aren't running over each other with their lawnmowers.

With 240 workers, the simple job of mowing the lawn becomes a

major task of control.

In state-of-the-art computing today, we know how to manage modest

levels of parallelism. But we don't know how to manage large

numbers of parallel processors effectively.

Everybody in the supercomputer industry is working on

parallelism. We're all at about the same level — 4 to 8

processors.

The next round will probably produce machines with anywhere from

16 to 64 processors. Effective application beyond that to general

purpose computing is not understood today. Ultimately it

certainly will be. It is equally certain that there will be many

failures along the way.


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Parallelism is an area where the U.S. clearly leads Japanese

manufacturers. All of the American supercomputer manufacturers

have a much better understanding of the software management and

operating problems of multiple systems.

Nevertheless, we are feeling the pressure of a concerted Japanese

effort to become the world leader in supercomputer technology.

What's even more significant is the Japanese not only are building

supercomputers for sale, they are embedding them into their

infrastructure. By placing supercomputers in both their

universities and workplaces, the Japanese are gearing up their

industries to use this very powerful tool.

Despite a greater awareness in the public and private sectors of

the importance of maintaining a lead in supercomputers, which

followed the FCCSET report of 1983. The U.S. still has not

regained the momentum lost in the decade from 1972 to 1982 or

built the necessary industry infrastructure.

There are several reasons for this.

First, we have become dependent on foreign sources for much of the

technology of supercomputers. Second, we have not restored the

breadth of policy or the practices that led to our past success.

Finally, there is insufficient recognition of the importance of

foreign markets in the economics of supercomputers.


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The Japanese have had no trouble understanding that advanced

technology is both the result of and the underpinning of

supercomputer development. They also understand world market

dynamics as well as the weakness of the U.S. in both areas.

ACTIONS THE U.S. SHOULD TAKE

The obvious question at this point is: What can the U.S.

government do to enhance the competitiveness of the U.S.

supercomputer industry?

There needs to be an ongoing rigorous dialogue with Japan to

achieve a level playing field in supercomputer trade. The

supercomputer agreement reached last year was a good start. This

dialogue should cover the whole range of issues from market access

to predatory pricing practices. I know these are tough problems,

but that doesn't mean they should be put in the "too hard" file.

Protective tariffs or government subsidies to prop up the domestic

supercomputer industry are not the answer.

What's really needed is a proactive, affirmative government policy

of supporting technological excellence in supercomputing.

This policy must take at least three forms:


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First, it should establish a formal program of assigning promising

supercomputer design proposals to specific laboratories and

agencies that will procure and integrate these systems into their

working environments. The procurement of supercomputers that

satisfy design and performance specifications should be guaranteed.

Two, it should relax and simplify export control procedures.

Export control policy is driven by defense needs, economic

concerns, and international relations. However, the concept of

"National Security Interest" has been taken to mean only the first

of these factors. Any broader interpretation will demand improved

communication and cooperation between industry and government.

This is equally true for the more mundane, but equally crucial

task of improving and speeding the licensing process itself.

Third, the policy should stipulate that the DOD, DOE, NSF and

other agencies give broader support to U.S. university

procurements of U.S. supercomputers. (There are still today more

supercomputers in Japanese universities than in our own

universities).


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Those, then, are three recommendations for a government policy to

help ensure the continued strength of the U.S. computer industry.

The uniqueness of supercomputers, both technologically and

economically, demands creative and cooperative approaches between

industry and government to development, procurement and use. If

we act together on this reality, we can preserve the lead we have

in supercomputing.

To quote the President's Commission on Industrial

Competitiveness: "Technology propels our economy forward."

And I would add: supercomputers propel technology.

Thank you.


1) the nature of the supercomputer business; 2) its importance; 3 ...€¦ · 25-02-1988 ·...

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