   US Government Pushes Petascale Computing
  Knight Ridder reports that: Supercomputers are about to get a lot more superQuote:WASHINGTON - The federal government is pushing computer scientists and engineers to greatly step up the speed and capacity of America's supercomputers...Powerful new telescopes, atom-smashers, climate satellites, gene analyzers and a host of other advanced instruments are churning out enormous volumes of computer bytes that will overwhelm even the swiftest existing machines.In the next five years, the government's goal is a computer system that can process at least a quadrillion (a million times a billion) arithmetic operations per second. The best current machines operate in the trillions (a thousand times a billion) of calculations per second. ...Henry Tufo, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who operates a Blue Gene/L system, said it would take petascale computer power to solve problems that stump present-day systems."One of the most compelling and challenging intellectual frontiers facing humankind is the comprehensive and predictive understanding of Earth and its biological components," Tufo said in an e-mail message. "Petascale systems will open up new vistas (for) scientists."To meet this goal, the National Science Foundation asked researchers on June 6 to submit proposals to develop the infrastructure for a petascale computing system to be ready by 2010. ...The Department of Energy also is offering $70 million in grants for teams of computer scientists and engineers to develop petascale software and data-management tools."The scientific problems are there to be solved, and petascale computers are on the horizon," said Walter Polansky, senior technical adviser in the DOE'S Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. ...There are links to more detailed information at the bottom of that article. The article lists crunching data from climate satellites as one of the reaons behind the push, but that contradicts this news from two weeks ago: NASA shelves climate satellitesQuote:NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment.The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models....``Today, when the need for information about the planet is more important than ever, this process of building understanding through increasingly powerful observations . . . is at risk of collapse," said Berrien Moore III, director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire....Almost every planned earth studying mission, all that have some contribution to understanding global warming, has been affected. The $100 million Deep Space Climate Observatory , already built, was canceled earlier this year. First proposed by then-Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s, the satellite was planned to give researchers a continuous picture of the sunlit surface of the earth and allow the first direct measurements of how much sunlight is absorbed and emitted, key information that could serve as an indicator of global warming.The Global Precipitation Measurement mission, designed to record rain, snow, and ice fall more accurately, has been delayed 2 1/2 years. It is meant to replace another satellite whose mission was extended last year. Now, scientists do not believe the older satellite will last until the Global Precipitation mission is launched, creating a big gap in data collection for weather prediction and climate modeling....Scientists at area universities say that they are worried most about a proposed 20 percent cut to research and analysis in the earth science budget, which funds smaller-scale projects. Many of these projects analyze data from satellites and help with long-term monitoring of earth systems. The cuts also may have a chilling effect on attracting and retaining university scientists, who realize their research could be only partially funded -- or not at all.``Missions can be delayed a year or two, but the most urgent issue right now is to restore the cuts to research and analysis," said Ronald G. Prinn, director of the Center for Global Change Science at MIT. ``We need to understand the climate system much better than we do."...I think that pushing petascale computers is a great idea, but I can't help but wonder if the stated goals are the actual goals. It's clear from many of the policies that have been enacted in the last few years that the current government of the United States is not "science friendly" - the cut backs in funding climate satellites point to that conclusion as well. It seems to me that a more likely motivation for pushing for increasing computer power for this government is national security, in particular, for improving electronic surveillance and data mining among other uses. So what do you think? Is this just a push for improved science as advertised or is there something else to it as well?    
  Well, to 'filter' the populations personal data on the internet/phone/whatever will take one hell of a computer system.  Honestly, I think this is the reason for the push.   ;  Ok, I'll be the naive one then. If you're looking to build a 'petascale' computer and need the money wouldn't it be a good idea to drop a project or two? Then can always send the satellite up later.   ;Quote:Original post by necreiaWell, to 'filter' the populations personal data on the internet/phone/whatever will take one hell of a computer system.  Honestly, I think this is the reason for the push.'Filtering' and looking for certain words/basic grammatical structures in sentences is not really pushing today's computers processing power very much.  It is a problem of IO and data troughput first and foremost.Now, if you're talking about voice recognition or a super-duper natural language processing AI that would try to psychologically profile individuals in real-time, then you're in a ballpark where I believe even a petascale computer isn't allowed to watch a game at.  Doing it slower than real-time would mean a petascale computer would only be able to solve ~1000 more given problems than a terascale computer is today in a given period of time.  This could already be done by dedicating 1000 standard tera-scale machines today to 1000 different problems.  Since even the most complex algorithm to parse a few sentences likely won't take more than a few hours to run, there is little benefit.The real advantage is being able to do very complex operations that can't easily be split among several computers 1000 times faster.  And that only works for very complex and interwinded tasks like meteorological system simulations.   ;Quote:Original post by jfclavetteQuote:Original post by necreiaWell, to 'filter' the populations personal data on the internet/phone/whatever will take one hell of a computer system.  Honestly, I think this is the reason for the push.'Filtering' and looking for certain words/basic grammatical structures in sentences is not really pushing today's computers processing power very much.  It is a problem of IO and data troughput first and foremost.i think it would entirely depend on the complexity of your search algoritm, you could search for complex pattrens, analyse trends, compare it agenst info from peole the subject frequently contacts;  The only part of the govenment I can imagine needing that much processing power is the NSA, which isn't a happy thought.   ;  The Department of Energy has substantial computing power needs as well; I guess you've never heard of Livermore or Sandia National Laboratories.   ;  It is a sad day when you can doubt your government's intentions and not be labeled a conspiracy theorist. [sad]On that note, I agree with smart_idiot.   ;  I honestly can't think of anything good the US government can use that for.  I really.  Really.  can't.  i'm not saying the prospect of such a machine is not awesome, I just don't believe the technology will be used solely for the benefit of humanity.   ;  Even assuming that it's going to be used for military/intelligence applications, I don't see how this can possibly be bad for the commercial sector. If the grants are being funded by NSF, then the research is public-domain.   