NY Times on Supercomputing Arms Race

On August 19, 2005, In R&D in the Press, By Peter Harsha

The New York Times’ John Markoff, who launched much of the media and congressional attention on computer science this year with his April 2005 piece “Pentagon Redirects Its Research Dollars“, is still on the computing beat. His most recent is today’s “A New Arms Race to Build the World’s Mightiest Computer.” Here’s a sample:

A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today’s most powerful machines.
And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant – China – eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse.
The new supercomputers will not be in use until the end of the decade at the earliest, but they are increasingly being viewed as crucial investments for progress in science, advanced technologies and national security.

The article highlights the recent announcements of long-term commitments by a number of countries to fund efforts to develop petaflop-scale computing systems. France, China and Japan have all initiated multi-year investments in programs designed to produce petaflop machines in the next decade. While support for supercomputing research and development here in the U.S. continues to “remain a priority” in the Administration’s plans, our commitment to long-term support for the development of these leadership class machines isn’t as stellar as it could be. PITAC’s June 2005 report on the state of computational science in the U.S. put it a bit more bluntly:

Yet, despite the great opportunities and needs, universities and the Federal government have not effectively recognized the strategic significance of computational science in either their organizational structures or their research and educational planning. These inadequacies compromise U.S. scientific leadership, economic competitiveness, and national security.

As the Council on Competitiveness is fond of noting, in order to compete in the global economy, you must be able to out-compute your rivals. The U.S. needs to ensure that it maintains a commitment to the long-term R&D that will continue to “prime the pump” for the innovations in high-end computing that will allow us to keep pace with our international competitors. Adopting PITAC’s recommendations (pdf) would be a good place to start.

 
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Bob Kahn Talks to C-Span

On August 15, 2005, In People, By Peter Harsha

An interesting interview with Turing Award co-winner (and CRA board member) Robert Kahn by C-Span’s Brian Lamb ran yesterday, covering everything from the birth of the Internet, to his role at DARPA, and whether he was a geek in high school and college. As is usually the case with C-span programs, it’s pretty in-depth and worth watching. It’s viewable online, and there’s a written transcript as well.
Here’s a snippet:

LAMB: Today, or even in history, how much has the taxpayer, through the government, paid for, do you think, to create this Internet?
KAHN: You know, I think, I don’t know the exact numbers and there may be no way to know the exact numbers, but I bet it’s the biggest bargain that the American taxpayer and the economy has ever had.
In fact, I remember in the late 1990s when the Clinton administration was riding a big economic boom, they had come out with some numbers that said one-third of all the growth in the economy was due to Internet-related activities of one sort or another.
I remember that when we built ARPANET, the very first of the networks, the actual money that was spent on the network piece of it was a few millions of dollars. I don’t have the exact number, but it was less than 10 million.
And if you took into account the amount of money that was spent on the research community to help them get their computers up and develop applications, maybe over its lifecycle a few tens of millions, that would be my guess, I don’t have the exact numbers, and maybe they are not findable anymore, but it was a number like that back in the early ’70s.
If you were to look at all the other monies that were spent in other agencies of the government, the Department of Energy had a major program, NASA had a major program in networking. Of course, you have all the National Science Foundation expenditures, you know, where money is spent on building other kinds of nets. I mentioned the satellite and radio net.
But, you know, if you compare that with what private industry is putting in even on year today, private industry contributions dwarf everything that the federal government probably put in over its lifetime.
And so that has got to be one of the biggest or most successful investments that has ever been made.

(“Mad props” to Tom Jones for the head’s up!)

 
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MSNBC Highlights NCWIT and Computing’s Image Problem

On August 15, 2005, In CRA, Policy, R&D in the Press, By Peter Harsha

A nice follow-up to last week’s post on the “science gap” and some of the ways the computing community is dealing with its “image problem” can be found today over
at MSNBC in a piece focusing on the new National Center for Women in IT (CRA and CRA-W form one “hub” of NCWIT — other hubs include the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, ACM, The Colorado Coalition for Gender and IT, Georgia Tech, The Girl Scouts of the USA, and The University of California). The piece is called Fewer women find their way into tech and here’s a tease:

The number of women considering careers in information technology has dropped to its lowest level since the mid-1970s — and one local nonprofit organization intends to do something about it.
Based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) wants to know why women are losing interest in technology — and what can be done to bring them back.

Read the whole thing.

 
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