Waiting for Exascale

Waiting for Exascale

University of Washington
13 February 2013

Gary M. Johnson
Computational Science Solutions

GMJ@ComputationalScienceSolutions.com

Outline
We’ve got a decade to wait for exascale computing capability.
What should we do in the meanwhile?

• Education
• eScience
• Big Data
Let’s explore a few • Effective Use of Petascale Computing
possibilities: • Broad HPC Deployment
• Computing in Industry
• Marginalization Risk
• Public Engagement
• Infrastructure Refresh
• Success Metrics

Computational Science Solutions 2

Education
African kids learn to read, hack Android on OLPC fondleslab
Why your next sysadmin could be Ethiopian

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco
1 November 2012 22:52 GMT

One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte has said children are not only
teaching themselves to read without teachers by using fondleslabs he provided, but
they are learning how to hack Android as well.

In an experiment, the OLPC dropped off Motorola Xoom tablets with solar chargers in
two Ethiopian villages and trained the local adult population how to charge them up.
Children were also given sealed boxes containing fondleslabs that were preloaded with
educational software and a memory card that tracks how the kids got on with the new
technology.

"I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only
opened the box, found the on-off switch ... powered it up," Negroponte told MIT
Review. "Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two
weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had
hacked Android.“

But what shocked the OLPC team was just how good the kids proved at understanding
and changing the tablet's operating system.

"The kids had completely customized the desktop - so every kid's tablet looked
different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that," said Ed
McNierney, OLPC's CTO. "And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of
creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to
learning.“
http://one.laptop.org/
It wasn't just the desktop that the children learned to subvert. The cameras on the
tablet had been disabled by an OLPC worker, but the children managed to get around
that and turn them back on again with no instruction.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/01/kids_learn_hacking_android/


Education
• Education is key
– We have no real idea about what skills will be needed a decade from now
– Education is crucial to future US competitiveness ‐ and to our well being as a society
– If we learn how to learn, then we can adapt to whatever the future may hold

• Don't just port the box, think outside it
– New applications areas
– Fundamental reformulations of problems
– New math and algorithms ‐ not just bigger hammers

• New modes of education
– The exascalers of tomorrow are now in high school
– MOOCs
• Coursera
• Udacity
• edX
– An exaMOOC...?
– The OLPC model…?

• Rewards & Recognition
– High‐prestige (open) publication venues
– Prizes for courseware
– New attitudes about promotion and tenure
– New views about education altogether


eScience

Jim Gray Michael Nielsen
2009 2011
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/ http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/michael-a-nielsen/


eScience
• All of science is becoming eScience
– Observational, experimental and computational facilities and science databases are
geographically dispersed
– It's a connected world
– Science is moving from being a spectator sport to one where anyone with "cognitive
surplus" can play

• Shift from Facility‐Centric to Scientist‐Centric computing model
– Scientists should determine what happens – not facility operators

• Create an open marketplace for computing cycles and services
– Computing “facilities” have very different character from observational and
experimental ones (see Jailbreaking HPC)

• Adopt the "app" mentality
– Is there an (exascale) app for that?


Big Data
Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
by Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil
October 2012
http://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century/

Dilbert - 5 September 2012
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-09-05/


Big Data
• All data is "Big" and all computing is "High Performance"
– Lake Wobegone effect...

• The year 2012 saw exascale stall and big data surge

• The ascendance of big data will continue
– Especially for unstructured data and its analysis and visualization tools

• Big Data is HPC
– It’s time to broaden our understanding of HPC and bring big data into the fold
– Embracing it will open HPC up to a slew of new and interesting applications
– It will also help us prepare for dealing with the data that exascale simulations will produce
– See Big Data Is HPC – Let's Embrace It


Effective Use of Petascale Computing

An Analysis of Computational Workloads for the ORNL Jaguar System
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2304611



4 applications sustain 1 petaflop on Blue Waters
released 01.29.13

Four large-scale science applications (VPIC, PPM, QMCPACK and
SPECFEM3DGLOBE) have sustained performance of 1 petaflop or more on the Blue
Waters supercomputer, and the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) run on Blue
Waters is the largest WRF simulation ever documented. These applications are part
of the NCSA Blue Waters Sustained Petascale Performance (SPP) suite and
represent valid scientific workloads.

http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/PFapps/


Stanford Lights Up One Million Sequoia Cores

January 28, 2013
Tiffany Trader
The 20 petaflop, third-generation IBM BlueGene system,
Sequoia, may be the number two supercomputer according
to the latest TOP500 rankings, but when it comes to max
core usage, Sequoia has apparently set a new record. A
team of Stanford engineers harnessed one million of
Sequoia's nearly 1.6 CPUs in parallel to solve a
sophisticated fluid dynamics problem.
Sequoia, the crown jewel of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories (LLNL), was the fastest supercomputer in the
world from June 2012 until November 2012, when it was
knocked from its perch by another DOE machine, Titan, the
Jet noise simulation. A new design for an engine nozzle is 27 petaflop (peak) Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge
shown in gray at left. Exhaust temperatures are in National Lab. Sequoia's 96 racks house 98,304 compute
red/orange. The sound field is blue/cyan. (Source: the
nodes, nearly 1.6 million cores and 1.6 petabytes of
Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford University)
memory, connected by a 5-dimensional torus interconnect.

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-01-28/stanford_lights_up_one_million_sequoia_cores.html?featured=top



The short version of the story is that we’re not
effectively using petascale computing
– but we ought to be…


Broad HPC Deployment
January 11, 2013

It seems like just yesterday that Encanto – that's Spanish for
"enchantment" – was launched as the pride (and potential salvation) of
New Mexico, primed to spur economic development by attracting high-
tech companies to the state. But money troubles have plagued the
system since its launch in 2008.

Last summer the State of New Mexico repossessed Encanto from the
non-profit that managed it, the New Mexico Computing Applications
Center. The system had racked up substantial debt, and there was
little funding for Encanto's maintenance and operation.

Now, according to a story in the Albuquerque Journal, this former

Salvaging Encanto
number-three superstar is headed to the chopping block. The state is
planning to sell off parts of the system to local research universities –
the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, and the
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology – to recoup some of
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-01-11/salvaging_encanto.html?featured=top its investment and pay off outstanding debts.

"Barring someone offering to buy the whole machine, we can still get
piecemeal use from it," state Information Technology Secretary Darryl
Ackley told the paper. "The universities have proposed to cannibalize
it to put some of the assets back into service."

The project was troubled from the start as the New Mexico
government made the unusual decision that the computer should pay
for itself by selling cycles to interested parties. Proponents of limited
government lambasted the project as a waste of taxpayer money,
while researchers expressed doubt over the sustainability of the
supercomputer-as-revenue-generator business model.


Broad HPC Deployment
• Among those working at the leading edge of HPC, petascale computing is seen as a
done deal
– Making exascale happen is where the action is
– We tend to forget that most of the computing world is operating at terascale or below

• HPC is a tool
– Ultimately, its success must be measured through its adoption and use
– Focusing so strongly on a performance target that is a factor of a million higher than the performance level currently
experienced by the majority of HPC users may not be a good idea

• Pushing the peak higher will not be useful unless we broaden the HPC base
– We need to bring more people into active HPC use
– We need to help users migrate upward in performance from terascale apps to petascale and beyond

• How might this be accomplished?
– Through the sort of educational activities mentioned previously
– By committing strongly to the development of new apps (see Meet the Exascale Apps), rather than just continuing to
port the same old legacy apps into environments for which they were not designed and to which they are unsuited
– By making petascale computing ubiquitous (see Petaflop In a Box)


Computing in Industry
INCITE PRACE

Most Innovative Industrial HPC End-User Application
in Europe - Open Competition in conjunction with 5th
PRACE Executive Industrial Seminar
LOCATION Stuttgart, Germany, 15th and 16th April 2013
PRACE are pleased to announce the launch of the second
round of its Competition for the Most Innovative HPC End-
User Application in Europe. This competition is organised
in conjunction with the 5th PRACE Industrial Seminar that
will take place on 15th and 16th of April 2013 in Stuttgart in
Germany. The theme of the 2013 event is ‘HPC Changing
Europe’s Industrial Landscape’.

The objective of this contest is to award the boldest
industrial HPC end-user application – we want to see how
far one can take this technology in changing the present
paradigms of HPC use by European industry. This
competition is open to all fields of HPC and industrial
sectors.
http://www.prace-ri.eu/open-competition-2013


Computing in Industry
• “Enhancing our economic competitiveness” is a standard justification for
pushing the HPC performance envelope
• We are told that there’s a “missing middle” in HPC
• Most industrial users compute at terascale
• INCITE is not addressing this issue
• PRACE is doing somewhat better
• The US has no “technology agency”
– No one is clearly in charge of advancing computation and its uses in science and
engineering
• DOE should do for energy applications what NASA did for aerospace


Marginalization Risk



Pinoccio Microcontroller to Crowdfund
the Internet of Things
By Nathan Hurst
01.12.13

Enter Pinoccio, an Indiegogo-funded microcontroller designed to let
you build and link projects to each other and to the web. It’s
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/01/pinoccio-indiegogo/ essentially a DIY “Internet of Things” controller in a tiny,
programmable package.

With comparable specs to the Arduino Mega, Pinoccio joins a host of
Android-based and Android-inspired packages available on the most
popular crowdfunding platforms. It is battery powered, includes a
temperature sensor, and Wi-Fi enabled (so long as you have at least
one with a Wi-Fi shield). Pinoccio is programmable using Arduino-
compatible software, and linkable in a sort of daisy chain via a low-
power radio signal.

“Our kind of overall mission with this whole project is to glue the
virtual and the physical together,” said Eric Jennings, Pinoccio co-
founder, on a live Q&A session on Friday. “If we can build all the
plumbing and the glue between that, so that things are connected
physically and virtually, as easy as they are right now between mobile
and web, then we feel like we’ve accomplished what we’ve been
trying to do.”



The Internet of You: How the future of
computing became screens and
sensors on every appendage
By Christopher Mims
January 10, 2013
wearable computing
Quartz.com

http://qz.com/42632/the-internet-of-you-how-the-future-of-computing-became-screens-and-sensors-on-every-appendage/


• The computing and communications landscape is changing quickly

• The distinction between data crunching and number crunching is blurring

• The “internet of things” and the “internet of us” are emerging

• The initiative in computing is passing from organizations to individuals

• Publishing has been radically changed by this

• Higher education appears to be next in the queue

• The funding model for science could also be impacted

• We need to adapt
– or science as we currently know it could become a marginal activity


Public Engagement
Darpa Open Sources Code for Building Your Own Amphibious Tank

By Robert McMillan
01.10.13

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/darpa-fang/

Two years ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates killed off the
Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle — a $13 billion misfire of an
attempt to build an armored boat that could make landfall and still
get around on the beach. But on Monday, the Department of
Defense will give you the chance to design something better.

The DoD’s forward-thinking Darpa group plans to release open-
source software that will let anyone design and run virtual tests on
their own swimming tank. And more than that, it will kick off the first
phase of a contest where you can pit your amphibious tank design
against everyone else’s. The prize: $1 million.


Public Engagement

OpenStreetMap Reaches 1 Million Users,
Will Rival Google Maps In 2 Years
Carl Franzen
January 12, 2013
TPMIdeaLab

OpenStreetMap is on a roll: Over eight
years after it was founded by a single
computer engineer in the UK, the free digital
map assembled by volunteers around the
globe crossed 1 million registered users as
of early this week, the start of 2013.

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/openstreetmap-reaches-1-
million-users-will-rival-google-maps-in-2-years.php


Public Engagement
3 Kickstarter‐Backed Films Earn Oscar Nods
Brian Anthony Hernandez
10 January 2013
Mashable

Sprinkled among the high-budget films nominated
for Oscars this year are three with humble financial
beginnings.

Inocente, Kings Point and Buzkashi Boys got
monetary boosts from crowdfunding platform
Kickstarter long before the Academy granted them
nods at Thursday's nominations event.

The flicks raised more than $90,000 from 558
http://mashable.com/2013/01/10/kickstart-films-oscars-nominations/ backers on Kickstarter. Those projects' creators are
just a few of the filmmakers who have raked in
$102.7 million in pledges since 2009.

"These are the fourth, fifth and sixth Kickstarter
projects to be nominated for Oscars," said
Kickstarter in a statement. "Incident in New
Baghdad, Sun Come Up, and The Barber of
Birmingham were all nominated in the past."


Public Engagement
• Will HPC still be an exclusive club a decade from now?
– In any case, should it be?
– Might we not be better off to engage as many people as possible in our enterprise?
• The “public” is part of the solution
– The more that people are engaged in computing, the better they will understand it – and support it
• Cognitive surplus
– Think of science activities like the Christmas Bird Count, NASA’s Zooniverse, or Foldit, just to name a few
– Between now and exascale, let’s get major citizen involvement in computational science and HPC
• Crowd sourcing
– We could try crowd sourcing some software and hardware development.
• On the software side, crowd sourcing has already gained some popularity (e.g., TopCoder)
• Given the widespread availability of components, like GPUs, prototyping platforms (e.g., Arduino & Raspberry Pi), and
other components (e.g., Adafruit Industries), hardware development doesn’t need to be just a spectator sport

• Crowd funding
– Those who choose not to participate in crowd sourcing might like to try crowd funding
• The general public currently funds creative projects of many types through sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Petridish
• Perhaps there’s room for sites that focus on topics related to HPC

• “Apps Populi”
– Let’s use the interconnectedness of our science to create distributed apps that engage the public directly


Infrastructure Refresh

Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only
Super-Speed Internet?

By Klint Finley
01.11.13

Google Fiber was supposed to be a
shaming exercise. But any shame felt by
the country’s big-name ISPs has yet to
produce the sort of ultra-high-speed
internet services we’ve all been hoping for.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-fiber-shaming-exercise/


Charles Arthur
7 February 2013

Mobile internet devices 'will outnumber
humans this year'
Cisco report says number of smartphones, tablets,
laptops and internet-capable phones will exceed
number of humans in 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/07/mobile-internet-outnumber-people

Cisco Forecasts 11.2 Exabytes per Month of
Mobile Data Traffic by 2017
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/n
s705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html



Your Gadgets Are Slowly Breaking the Internet
The Internet isn’t robust enough for the ongoing explosion of connected
devices. Now labs around the country are scrambling for solutions.
By David Talbot
January 9, 2013

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509721/your-gadgets-are-slowly-breaking-the-internet/

The grand challenge is to overhaul the Internet to better serve an expected flood of 15 billion
network-connected devices by 2015—many of them mobile—up from five billion today,
according to Intel estimates.

The Internet was designed in the 1960s to dispatch data to fixed addresses of static PCs
connected to a single network, but today it connects a riot of diverse gadgets that can zip from
place to place and connect to many different networks.

As the underlying networks have been reworked to make way for new technologies, some
serious inefficiencies and security problems have arisen (see “The Internet is Broken”).
“Nobody really expects the network to crash when you add one more device,” says Peter
Steenkiste, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. “But I do have a sense this is
more of a creeping problem of complexity.”
Over the past year, fundamentally new network designs have taken shape and are being
tested at universities around the United States under the National Science Foundation’s Future
Internet Architecture Program, launched in 2010.



http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/



• Between now and exascale, we need to do a whole lot of infrastructure development
and build out
• No matter what we’ll be calling the cloud by then, everything will be in it, from
personal devices and internet‐enabled things up through those exascale computers
• Robustness, connectivity and communications bandwidth will be keys to the success of
this environment
• In a recent report card for America’s infrastructure, the American Society of Civil
Engineers (ASCE) gave the US an overall grade of D
• The ASCE didn’t specifically address computing and communications infrastructure,
but the Technology CEO Council asserts that “The national information and
telecommunications infrastructure currently deployed for today’s technological
applications is not robust enough to support the technological advancements of the
future.”
• Clearly there are lots of things we need to start doing now in order to have the
necessary infrastructure to exploit exascale later


Success Metrics

Top problems with the TOP500
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/TOP500problem/

2013: Time to stop talking about Exascale
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B8QCZ3jIFMVlMDdRS243RzdEcms


Success Metrics
• In moving forward with HPC there’s also a lot of rethinking we need to devote to our success
metrics

• Kudos go to Bill Kramer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for
taking the courageous step of opening the conversation on this topic (see Top problems with
the TOP500 and Blue Waters Opts Out of TOP500)

• More recently, Bill Gropp, also from NCSA, has joined this conversation (see 2013:Time to
stop talking about Exascale)

• Alongside the TOP500, the Green500 and Graph 500 lists have gained in popularity in recent
years and other possibilities have been suggested (see HPC Lists We’d Like to See), but the
success metric issue remains an open one

• Computers are tools and we need to measure their success by how well they enable
discovery and solve problems

• We’re not there yet, but maybe we can get a bit closer before 2022


Let’s Not Wait
• Exascale computing may be a decade away, but there’s a lot to accomplish to be
ready to exploit it

• We’ve explored a few options here

• We make no claim that these constitute the right agenda for the coming decade,
nor do we suggest that we’ve given an exhaustive to‐do list

• Our intention is rather to open the conversation about what we should do while
“waiting” for exascale

• So, let us know what you think
– Contribute to the conversation here: Waiting for Exascale


Thank You for
Your Attention

Contribute to the Conversation
at the Google Plus Community:

Please also see the HPCwire article


Solutions for a Connected World

Mission:

• Develop, advocate, and implement solutions for the global computational science and
engineering community

Execution:

• Exploit computing and networking technologies to develop new directions in education,
research, applications and outreach
• Consider both information-based and physical sciences-based problems.
• Partner with others to develop synergies and build mutual strengths
• Provide education, training and outreach services

Contact:

PO Box 270953
Fort Collins, CO 80527-0953

Phone : 970 225-3794

Info@ComputationalScienceSolutions.com

Waiting for Exascale

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