Category Archives: Government

Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to spur innovation

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Photo of sun behind a factoryOn June 24, President Obama announced the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) between the federal government, academia, and businesses to help stimulate the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. We have been following the so-called “Missing Middle” of small- to medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) on this blog, and I’d like to describe some of the recent initiatives to engage this high-potential segment of our economy.

Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama described that AMP would allocate $500 million of federal money to help make U.S. manufacturing more competitive around the world.

Inspired by a report drafted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which found that there are market failures in the advanced manufacturing space that need to be overcome by government intervention, AMP will focus on five initiatives:

  1. Manufacturing for national security
  2. Materials science
  3. Robotics
  4. Energy efficiency
  5. Developing partnerships and consortia between government, universities, and industry Continue reading →

U.S. manufacturing and HPC: A bold plan to equip the “missing middle”

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Photo of a factoryHPC in the Cloud ran an article last week written by Jon Riley of the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS). The article talked about the initiative by NCMS to rejuvenate manufacturing in the United States by connecting manufacturers with supercomputing hardware and software to make them more competitive in the global marketplace.

The leap from tried-and-true methods to newer technologies has historically been a difficult one, but it almost always pays off big in the long run. In the late 1990s, for instance, the Electric Boat Corporation (which has been the builder of submarines for the U.S. Navy ever since they were introduced a hundred years earlier) embarked on designing and building the USS Virginia, the first of a new class of attack submarines. This was the first time a U.S. submarine was going to be designed entirely on a computer before it was to be built.

There was no margin for error. A brand new class of submarine had to go from design to construction to launch in a matter of several years and perform excellently at sea to prove its worth as a weapons platform.

As it turns out, the USS Virginia was launched on schedule in 2003 and operated without a glitch during its first sea trials. Computer-aided design, which had accurately simulated every corner and lever of the submarine, proved an extremely effective way to design submersibles. The CAD software even alerted designers whenever a space was laid out in the blueprint that would prove too cramped for sailors to live and work.

Continue reading →

HPC and the life sciences

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Connected network cablesThis week, a team from our company visited a large laboratory located in the Chicago area. IT representatives there told us how a major focus for them has been migrating their computing resources from a model of individual workgroups using separate clusters to a shared private cloud that all research teams in the facility can access for running their jobs. This shift to private clouds for getting the most out of dedicated clusters is a hot topic of conversation in the HPC world.

HPC in the Cloud recently published an article responding to a case study written by Platform Computing about the implementation of a private cloud at the Harvard Medical School. Both are worth a read if you are interested in the challenges encountered by small- and medium-sized life sciences organizations when they try to adopt HPC clusters.

HPC holds much promise for organizations such as the Harvard Medical School. With middleware such as Platform Computing (we are biased, I must admit, since this is what HPC clusters by ICC deploy as well) it is getting easier to operate an HPC cluster with hosts running different operating systems and applications. It used to be that this multiplicity of software on the same cluster would cause extensive compatibility and usability problems, but not so much anymore. End-users in the life sciences (such as medical researchers) are benefiting from computing applications that are productive and easy to use.

So Harvard Medical School, as the HPC in the Cloud article describes, has migrated from an inefficient computing model of unshared individual computers scattered across various laboratories to a centralized private cloud that can be accessed by any of those users and managed as one unit. Simplifying maintenance while maximizing accessibility to HPC resources by medical school staff is most likely going to save money and increase the pace of innovation in the long run.

While this is a hopeful case study that sheds light on how other organizations can pool their computing resources to great effect, challenges remain for spreading this model to other small- and medium-size laboratories and businesses. For one, private medical companies are heavily regulated by the government and their IT infrastructure has to incorporate many time-consuming applications to store detailed records.

HPC is becoming more affordable and easier to use, but software has to continue evolving to accommodate the particular context of each industry. Only then will the life sciences (not to mention other markets) have a truly turn-key HPC solution that can benefit labs and private companies of every size.

Worldwide race heats up for HPC leadership

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Planet earthAn article in Computer World by Patrick Thibodeau reports how David Turek, the vice-president of IBM, spoke last week about the growing emergence of China in the worldwide HPC competition. Turek said, “Within a year, there will be more Top500 systems in China than there are in Europe collectively.”

China currently holds the claim to having built the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. The U.S., according to the article, has 282 supercomputers in the Top500 listing, China contributes 24, and Europe has about 100. Growing their share of HPC four times over in the next year would be an impressive achievement for China.

U.S. supercomputer manufacturers, naturally, are somewhat fearful of this progress abroad. Turek, somewhat alarmed, commented, “You have sovereign nations making material investments of a tremendous magnitude to basically eat our lunch, eat our collective lunch.”

U.S. business and government are taking measures to make the United States even more competitive in the HPC market, lest that homegrown production goes the way of the U.S. automobile industry. While China is building an enormous new supercomputing center in Shenzhen, the challenge for the United States will be not only to continue leading technologically, but convincing more and more sectors of the U.S. economy that HPC solutions can grow their business beyond what their obsolete equipment now allows.

Mircosoft responds to government raids in Russia

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Image of Lady Justice courtesy of Einar Einarsson Kvaran. Accessed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JMR-Memphis1.jpg)An article in Computer Reseller News by Kevin McLaughlin describes how Microsoft has been forced to change its software licensing policy because the Russian government has been overzealously prosecuting small organizations for violating piracy laws.

In reality, these Russian NGOs that have had their offices raided by the Russian government were not committing software theft. Rather, they offended the Russian government in some way by either opposing or protesting government policy, and software piracy is a convenient excuse in Russia for law enforcement to bash up political opposition.

Microsoft grants NGOs a certain amount of free copies of their software, and these Russian organizations were within their legal right to use it. Nevertheless, Microsoft has been slow to clear the reputation of these maligned NGOs, as McLaughlin notes.

Perhaps as a result of bad publicity, Microsoft has just started to take aggressive measures to make sure these fake charges of piracy do not happen again. They have changed their NGO license policy to make it explicitly clear that organizations such as the Russian NGOs that were raided by the government are not in committing theft if they use the free copies of Microsoft programs that are allotted to them.

While this may stop the bad publicity and also prevent the Russian government from using Microsoft as a political tool, the root cause of the problem will remain. If corrupt officials in Russia can’t use the software piracy excuse to raid the offices of dissident organizations, they’ll find some other reason.

BP oil spill elicits emergency response from HPC

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Supercomputers have become an extension of the human mind, “thinking” for us in a short amount of time when our own brains would take countless hours to do the same calculations. In one of the most recent applications of HPC (high-performance computing), scientists have received an emergency grant from the National Science Foundation to model in 3D the future spread of the BP oil spill.

The spill, which occurred on April 20th, has steadily been spreading to the coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico. Although efforts are underway to stem the expansion of the spilled oil (for instance, today BP started injecting heavy mud around contaminated areas), no one is certain that they will work.

So to prepare for any eventuality, researchers have turned to supercomputers to understand how the the dynamics of the oil. According to the article in Computerworld, 1 million compute hours have been allocated on the supercomputer called “Ranger” at the Texas Advanced Computing Center  (one compute hour is one CPU core running for one hour, whereas the Ranger has 63,000 cores).

The model employed to simulate the spill is called Adcirc (Advanced Circulation Model for Oceanic, Coastal and Estuarine Waters). Scientists are currently updating this 2D model to make it 3D. This will allow them to calculate how oil travels underwater when it encounters the various vegetation and other obstructions near the coastal areas.

Another contingency that the researchers are preparing for is the possibility that a summer hurricane will sweep up oil from the Gulf spill and carry it to land, potentially causing contamination in areas where people live. The new 3D model will hope to account for that as well.

As the case of the BP oil spill demonstrates, nations are relying more and more on supercomputers in emergency situations to help scientists and policy makers understand and predict the outcomes of national disasters.

HPC helps combat malaria

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Scientific American reports (accessed via HPCwire) that a project partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will use supercomputing to help stop the spread of malaria, which kills about a million people a year.

The team tasked with working on the malaria project is sharing a 1,104-core HPC (high-performance computing) supercomputer with a nuclear reactor research company. With the help of mathematical modeling, researchers are trying to find patterns in nature that would allow them to predict and control malaria outbreaks. From the Scientific American article:

The software pulls biological data on the behavior and reproductive rates of the Plasmodium parasites and the mosquitoes that carry them, as well as information on infection patterns and immune responses among humans. Other data include where people live and how they travel, environmental factors (temperature, rainfall and elevation) that are important to malaria transmission, and the locations of different species of mosquitoes.

The article also features an interesting discussion about cloud computing compared to local servers. The malaria research team is using local servers and not cloud computing for their simulations, even though the Microsoft software they are using is geared towards the cloud (see our post about the new Microsoft Technical Computing Group).

The team uses local servers for national security reasons – servers in the cloud frequently operate outside of the United States and many government-sponsored research projects can not put their data at risk in such a way. This illustrates that, despite the unifying effects of science and globalization, politics is still a formidable factor in even the noblest of global projects.

The article also notes that cloud computing is still far behind in performance compared to running local servers. As a systems engineer working on the malaria project observes, using local servers is about ten times faster than using the cloud.

While cloud computing technology still has a long way to go to catch up to the performance capabilities of locally-run servers, HPC in all of its forms is nevertheless helping people to battle some of the earth’s deadliest diseases.

HPC and lithium-air electric cars

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HPCwire featured an article last week about how supercomputers are helping to produce an economical battery for the next generation of electric cars.

According to the article, a new type of rechargeable battery is being developed that will rival the current standard of lithium-ion. These batteries, called lithium-air batteries, have a much greater energy density than lithium-ion batteries and can theoretically power a car for 500 miles on a single charge (as opposed to 50-100 miles per charge with lithium-ion batteries).

The problem with lithium-air technology is that it is many years of research behind lithium-ion. To remedy this problem, the U.S. Department of Energy has paid for 24 million hours of time on supercomputers. With the help of this processing power, scientists can run complicated models to work out the details about which chemicals would work best in the lithium-air battery.

If supercomputers can effectively speed up the scientific research process, then the gap between technological idea and technology product can be drastically reduced. This applies to much more than battery technology (although that is of primary importance, given our oil dependency and emissions problems).

New forms of alternative energy (such as harnessing wave energy) can be accelerated through the research process to compete with established products like wind farms. With the help of HPC, scientists can model how new medicines will interact with an infection and the human body and get them to market much faster.

As these various applications suggest, HPC and supercomputing are tools that are solving pressing, real-world problems.

NASA’s new supercomputing application and Gov 2.0

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I ran across an article on Information Week via HPCWire about NASA’s new supercomputing application.

The application, which will be unveiled later today, is powered by the world’s sixth most powerful computer (according to the Top 500 ranking in 2009) and will be called the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX for short).

This application will allow scientists from all over the world to log into NEX and use its computing power virtually to perform computational research. According to Information Week, even scientists that are not computer wizards would be able to utilize this user-friendly scientific application.

The article also mentioned some interesting political implications resulting from a government-owned and globally-shared supercomputer like NEX. Foreign scientists often lack the U.S. government security clearance to access such tools and data as on NEX.

The scientific community has always prided itself on being cosmopolitan: it’s concerns are for the advancement of science, not towards any political end. Nevertheless, that’s not always the case (e.g. scientists’ close collaboration with government objectives to develop the nuclear bomb in the 1940s). A new challenge for U.S. government will be to balance global scientific collaboration with national security concerns.

The Information Week article links to an interesting website called Gov 2.0 Expo, which is a conference that examines the role of information technology in helping make government more efficient, accountable, responsive and transparent. We’ve covered this topic on the blog before and will continue to follow it, as it provides an interesting perspective on the age-old problem of government responsibility.

Digitizing the tax process

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Today is Tax Day and T. Lau at EnterpriseITPlanet.com asks an interesting question about our tax process:

As last minute filers rush to the post office, or as is more likely with this crowd, log online to file electronically, you are probably wondering why, in 2010, the IRS isn’t a more tech-savvy enterprise. Why can’t you file forms (like extensions) electronically, for example? Or look up past tax returns and refund or payment history? Most Americans readily accept online security measures with banking and credit card companies as perfectly adequate, so why the quill and paper methodology?

As I’ve written about earlier on the blog, the federal government is looking to new technologies to streamline the work of their agencies and cut costs. According to Lau, the government now owns about 10 percent of data centers in the U.S. But the trend has been for the government to switch to the cloud because virtualization allows the government to become significantly more efficient (the Brookings Institution, Lau writes, estimates that the federal government will cut down 25-50% of costs).

So, why hasn’t the federal government switched to completely digitizing the tax system? First, some people especially of the older generation may not be tech-savvy and would have a hard time with a digital tax filing process. In addition, eliminating a paper trail is a risky proposal in government because digital records can be manipulated much more easily than hard copies by those who choose to abuse power. The government and especially the public will have to balance competing priorities – like government efficiency with personal liberty – to arrive at a compromise that best utilizes the computing technology available.