US learns to out-compute in order to out-compete~Blue Gene/L ~ world's fastest supercomputer.

An almost audible sigh of relief arose from Washington last week as Blue Gene/L, a computer built by International Business Machines, claimed the title of the world's fastest supercomputer.

Science and technology policymakers have spent the past two years fretting that the US was losing its lead in high-performance computing, with potentially serious implications for national competitiveness.

"We believe that to out-compete, we must out-compute," said Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, one of many lobby groups pressing federal agencies to spend more on supercomputer research.

The lobbying campaign was sparked by the success of the Earth Simulator, a supercomputer built to model climate change by NEC, the Japanese electronics group. When full details of the Earth Simulator's performance emerged in early 2002 it was clear that Japan had not only overtaken the US in terms of raw computing speed but done so by a metaphorical mile.

With a sustained performance of 35 teraflops 35 thousand million operations a second the machine was then four times faster than its nearest rival.

Equally significant was the way in which this performance had been achieved. The Earth Simulator was the result of a $300m, long-term collaboration between Japan's public and private sectors. Instead of being built from a "cluster" of off-the-shelf components the approach favoured by an increasing number of US supercomputers almost every aspect of the Earth Simulator was custom-built for the project.

"It was a wake-up call," says Dan Reed, director of the Institute for Renaissance Computing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In the 1990s US government agencies cut back on supercomputing research, which had been driven in earlier decades by the requirements of the nuclear weapons industry. Researchers turned to clustering, which enabled them to build fast machines that were relatively inexpensive. The results have been impressive. A cluster of Apple G5 processors built at Virginia Polytechnic Institute emerged last year as one of the world's top 10 supercomputers. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois built a high-performance machine from clusters of chips used in Sony'sPlayStation console.

But clusters are not suitable for all applications. The success of the Earth Simulator, designed to run models of world climate over thousands of simulated years, was a reminder that research into alternative designs had been neglected.

Added urgency came from the fact that scientific fields as diverse as drug discovery and astrophysics now rely on the ability to run extremely complex simulations. Mr Reed argues that computer simulation has become the third pillar supporting scientific discovery, supplementing experiment and theory.

Businesses, too, are starting to glimpse a future in which supercomputers could be used to reduce costs and improve productivity. John Marburger, policy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told a conference of supercomputer users this summer that "we are approaching a tipping point beyond which entirely new applications of computing will bring a new wave of transformations in our industrial ways of life".

Mr Marburger's speech confirmed that the lobbying has put high-performance computing back on the US government's agenda. The irony is that Blue Gene/L a hybrid design between custom-built and clustered off-the-shelf approaches was built without federal money. IBM started work on the design in 1999, long before the power of the Earth Simulator became known, and has since spent about $100m on the project. The company hopes to recoup its investment by using the Blue Gene architecture as the basis for a new generation of supercomputers to meet the expected upsurge in demand. IBM also believes that it will next year shatter its new 36 teraflop performance benchmark as Blue Gene/L is expanded. The aim is for 360 teraflops in 2005.

However, Dave Turek, vice-president of Deep Computing at IBM, concedes that its design will not be suitable for all types of problem-solving. "In this business, one size does not fit all."

Meanwhile, Japanese scientists are hoping to build on the success of the Earth Simulator, and the European Union is backing plans for a "grid" linking computers across the continent.

The next milestone is a supercomputer capable of petaflop performance a million, million operations per second. Such mind-boggling computing power no longer seems like science fiction, and more than national bragging rights are at stake.

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But clusters are not suitable for all applications.

Not necessarily true. It would have been more accurate to say that all applications are not suitable for clusters.

Monolithic supercomputers may be sexy and attract the press, but the future of supercomputing is in clustering, particularly in the arena of Beowulfs. No one but the government can afford monolithic supercomputers any more. Much work is being done on HPC systems using MPI and PVI or based on highly integrated solutions like OpenMosix or OpenSSI and hosted on Linux platforms and commodity hardware.

I know of one organization running MM5 on a Beowulf cluster using Intel or AMD hardware. So much for the Earth Simulator.

Researchers turned to clustering, which enabled them to build fast machines that were relatively inexpensive. The results have been impressive. A cluster of Apple G5 processors built at Virginia Polytechnic Institute emerged last year as one of the world's top 10 supercomputers. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois built a high-performance machine from clusters of chips used in Sony'sPlayStation console.

But will it make Quicken balance my checkbook? The most important question: will it help FR load faster?

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