Okay, I admit I borrowed that line from Spiro Agnew, but I am applying it to the politicians and public intellectuals, mostly on the right side of the political spectrum, who argue that any government investment in technology represents “industrial policy,” or “picking winners and losers,” or, more recently, “corporate cronyism.”
Here is a case where the U.S. government is spending $425 million on new supercomputers that will compete against China’s efforts to dominate the industry. How is this different from trying to help Solyndra get off the ground in the solar energy field? Or A123 Systems in lithium ion batteries? The private sector will reap rewards from this initiative in at least two ways: IBM and Nvidia will benefit because the government is paying them to build these new systems and other private sector firms will be able to rent out time on the supercomputers to help design products or conduct various forms of research.
In my view, this is exactly what the U.S. government should be doing in key fields in response to global challenges to American technological leadership? It’s going to be fascinating to see whether the knuckleheads on the right come out and attack this.
U.S. to Spend $425 Million on Supercomputers
Energy Department to Install Two IBM Systems, Invest in ‘Extreme Scale’ Technologies
ENLARGE
Two IBM supercomputers valued at $325 million will be installed at national laboratories in the Energy Department’s ‘Coral’ project. Uncredited/Associated PressThe federal government said Friday it will spend $425 million to advance supercomputer technology, the latest sign of its determination to leapfrog China in a field often linked to national security and economic competitiveness.
The U.S. Department of Energy plans to install two International Business Machines Corp. systems valued at $325 million at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee The project, called Coral, also includes Argonne National Laboratory. The machines, which will incorporate technology from chip maker Nvidia Corp. , will carry out calculations five to seven times faster than the most advanced U.S. systems now in use, the department said.
Another $100 million will go toward developing “extreme scale” supercomputing technologies as part of a program titled FastForward 2. Illinois-based Argonne would pick a supercomputer under the Coral program later, the agency said.
Supercomputers, room-size systems that comprise thousands of microprocessor chips, perform tasks that include simulating nuclear explosions, cracking encryption codes, projecting climate trends and locating oil deposits. China’s 2013 success in building a system that topped a closely watched ranking of computer performance—interrupting years of U.S. dominance—prompted calls by U.S. scientists for greater government support.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who announced the projects Friday at an event in Washington, D.C., said in prepared remarks that they would foster “transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research.”
The two supercomputers, whose installation is expected to begin in 2017, will exploit new technologies in the race to solve tough scientific problems.
IBM, for example, will employ what it calls a data-centric design to reduce the need to shuttle massive amounts of data within the supercomputers. Nvidia, meanwhile, will contribute chips to handle number-crunching as well as a new technology called NVLink designed to transfer data between them at unusually high speed.
These new approaches are designed to reduce energy consumption and address other emerging challenges, executives of the two companies said.
Starting in the 1990s, computer makers assembled supercomputers by stringing together the kinds of processor chips and other components used in personal computers. In recent years, that technology has been augmented by chips from Nvidia and others that evolved from technology used to render graphics in videogames.
But such machines consume huge amounts of electricity. Improving performance by simply stacking more of those components together wouldn’t be practical, industry executives and computer scientists say.
Moreover, computer designers are grappling with an explosion in the amount of data that users want to sift through, said Dave Turek, an IBM vice president in charge of high-performance computing efforts. Much of the computation conducted to locate underground oil deposits, for example, is in preparing data for analysis rather than the analysis itself, he said.
Without an expansion in computing capacity, the data-handling challenge appears likely to come to a head in about three years, Mr. Turek said, based on conversations IBM had with supercomputer users.
“They were telling us, they saw a real problem around 2017,” he said.
To solve it, IBM added computing power to components—including data storage and networking devices—that usually carry a light burden of calculation. That way, the supercomputer can delegate heavier computing tasks to those components and reduce the amount of data that must be transferred and processed by central processing units, Mr. Turek said.
The systems to be installed at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge will use future versions of IBM Power chip line to handle basic computation chores. Other calculations are handled by a new version of Nvidia’s graphic chips, code-named Volta, said Sumit Gupta, an Nvidia executive in charge of its accelerated computing efforts. Mellanox Technologies Ltd. will supply other communications technology.
The news from the Energy Department comes a few days before the release of a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 largest supercomputers, dubbed the Top500. It isn’t clear whether the new systems would surpass China’s Tianhe-2 machine, which first reached the top of the list in June 2013 and has remained there since.
Cray Inc. previously was selected to install supercomputers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory that are considered contenders for the top ranks of the Top500 list. The company uses Intel Corp. chips in some of its latest machines.
Horst Simon, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley lab and head of its supercomputer efforts, said many U.S. scientists would have preferred that the Energy Department had launched its latest expenditures sooner.
“This investment is late, but it’s still a significant investment,” he said.
