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Introduction
Larry L. Smarr
National Center for SupercomputingApplicaiions
University of Illinois
We are gathered together at a moment in which the country is going
to have to make some critical decisions about its future, and many of the
people attending will help make those decisions.
I think the question we are all asking is, Why supercomputers? We
certainly understand that the media like supercomputers. We read about
supercomputing. We hear about it. And yet many of you here from
corporations are wondering, Do I need to get involved in supercomputing?
And if so, how? What are some of the reasons?
It is not enough that supercomputers represent some of the most
exciting technology today.
Senator Gore in his keynote speech really put his finger on it. It is a
technology the use of which by American industry may very well determine
the future of the U.S. economy in the global economy. The constant
references to the supercomputer as the steam engine of the information
age or the machine tool of the l990s are shorthand attempts to capture
that idea. And yet probably not more than 15 percent of the Fortune 500
companies own supercomputers, so supercomputers are not seen as being
fundamental to all research, development, and manufacturing today.
But if you are watching the trends, you will discover major changes
happening in corporations embracing this technology. We have here to-
day representatives from three of those trend-setting corporations Abbott
Laboratories, Eastman Kodak Company, and Apple Computer, Inc. Listen
to why they are using supercomputers and listen to the struggle they are
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LARRY L. SMARR
going through internally to get their people, their scientists, and their en-
gineers to use these machines. What I have found and I have probably
talked to several hundred industries in the last 2 years is that in many
ways the resistance is coming primarily from the scientists and engineers
themselves.
As I have reflected on this phenomenon, I think that much of the
difficulty goes back to the key role that universities play in their relationship
to industry, as well as to the critical role that federal funding for science
plays in determining the pace of scientific progress and the future of this
country. Between l9?o and 1985 there was a period that I have referred to
as the "supercomputer famine in American universities."
During this period federal funds were cut off for placing advanced
computing equipment in our universities. For these 15 years, university
students and professors were not doing their research on supercomputers.
For 15 years industry hired students from universities who did not bring
those skills and attitudes into industry that would create a demand for
supercomputing. Now our country has placed up to very high levels in
industry a whole generation of scientists, engineers, and managers who
have never used, seen, or cared about a Supercomputer
From this point of view, it is not difficult to understand why there has
been resistance to the use of supercomputers in industry and why America
has missed its opportunity to take advantage of these machines and place
them at the base of the American economy.
Fortunately this situation is changing extremely rapidly because of the
foresight of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Congress.
They undertook an initiative in 1984 to set up a national program for
providing supercomputing access to American universities. This consisted
of creating national Supercomputer centers and beginning to build what
Senator Gore referred to as the "superhighways of the information age."
This proposed national network would hook together the Supercomputer
centers with the research universities in the country, thereby coupling the
personal computers or workstations on the investigators' desks with the
remote supercomputers.
That program now funds five Supercomputer centers. Doyle Knight,
a member of the steering committee for this meeting, is the director of
the John van Neumann Center in Princeton, and I am the director of the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University
of Illinois; Sid Karin, the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center,
is also participating in this symposium. The other two centers are the
Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center and the Cornell Supercomputer Facility.
All of the American Supercomputer manufacturers (Cray Research, Inc.,
Control Data Corporation's ETA Systems (disbanded in April 1989), and
IBM Corporation) have been represented in those centers. Three years
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INTRODUCTION
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ago, one had to leave the United States and go to Europe to get access to
American-built supercomputers to do basic research. Now we have created
a national infrastructure that, between the five centers, serves roughly
6000 scientists at 200 universities in the United States. Each scientist is
allocated time through a peer review of proposed research to assure the
quality of the projects. That is a rather miraculous discontinuous change by
American time scales. What we are going to see now is that the graduates
of these 200 universities will come to industries wanting to know where
their supercomputers are to do their work.
This will be similar to what we saw when engineers, who previously had
used drafting tables, wanted to know where their CAD/CAM workstations
were when they were hired. In a short period of time the whole notion
of engineering CAD/CAM changed in America, and both productivity and
the complexity of design increased.
Through the NSF supercomputing centers, the federal government is
providing universities with the kind of education and training necessary to
bring new blood into the national pool of individuals trained in advanced
computing. Unfortunately this does not directly help the vast current
research community within industry that is not going to go through that
process. What we need to do is to create additional structures to expose
key industry people to the same opportunities, so that they develop the
enthusiasm for advanced computing that we see among the bright young
graduate students and professors in American universities.
Each of the five NSF centers is pursuing industrial participation at their
centers in different ways. One model will be discussed in this symposium
when Cliff Perry talks of Kodak's participation in our center. Over 60
researchers from Kodak have come to the NCSA Interdisciplinary Research
Center in the last 2 years to convert codes that run on ordinary computers
without visualization to ones that work in a modern distributed environment
of supercomputers networked to mainframes and workstations. They can
work with some of the world's experts in visualization technologies to create
visual interfaces to the massive numeric data fields they compute.
The most important principle that I have learned as director of a center
is that if this country is really going to meet this crisis and take advantage
of this opportunity, teamwork is going to be the key idea. This means
both the structural teamwork between the federal government, industry,
and universities and the kind of teamwork we see in our Interdisciplinary
Research Center between individual scientists, artists, computer scientists,
and computer professionals working together as small teams to take on
problems of enormous complexity. Teamwork is America's strong suit. It
is what will pull us through this.
A very good example of the results of teamwork can be seen in the art
exhibit presented at this symposium by Donna Cox, an assistant professor
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LARRY L 5~4RR
of art and design at the University of Illinois and an adjunct professor
at NCSA. She is one of the most innovative computer artists today. She
creates her art by taking the numeric output of supercomputers, in areas
of science, engineering, and mathematics, and then working with what
she terms a "Renaissance team" an artist, a scientist, and a computer
scientist to create beautiful visualizations. Scientists are able to see their
results through this teamwork in ways that they, as individual scientists,
would never have known how to do, and the visual result ends up as pure
art that is being shown in galleries all over the United States, and now
internationally.
I think you could hear in Senator Gore's voice, as he gave his keynote
address, a sense of urgency. I believe that he feels as many of us feel. I just
came back from 12 days in Japan. If I felt an urgency before, I certainly
feel a great deal more urgency now. This is very serious business. I think
we have possibly a 1- or 2-year window as a country to take advantage of
some of the lead we have in distributed computing, visualization, and our
long tradition of using supercomputers in national laboratories.
But it will not happen by the normal process of diffusion on the time
scale that we usually use in this country. It must be something more
than that. I think that making that extra effort is what Senator Gore was
challenging us to do.
The first session of this symposium, "The Changing Landscape of
Supercomputer Technology," is a tutorial given by two of the leading
experts on the technology of supercomputers.
First, Jack Worlton will tale about the various kinds of architectures
one finds in the supercomputer arena, how we have reached the point
where we are today, and something about the computer industry itself.
Jack is a lifetime laboratory fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
He has spent 30 years in the laboratory in a number of key positions. He
is now president of Worlton and Associates, and he consults and lectures
worldwide. He is probably the most sought-after speaker in the world today
for teaching people about the technology of supercomputers. He is also,
by the way, one of the world's experts on the actual details of U.S. and
Japanese competition in this area.
He will be followed by Steve Chen, who studied for his Ph.D. from the
University of Illinois with David Kuck and represents one of the brilliant
people who have come out of that long tradition at Illinois since World
War II in architectures and software engineering for supercomputers. He
went, after being at Floating Point Systems, to Cray Research, Inc. He
was chief designer of the X-MP, which has been one of the best-selling
supercomputers to date. He then became senior vice president at Cray
Research, Inc. Recently, he moved on to become the president and chief
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INTRODUCTION
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executive officer of Supercomputer Systems, Inc. Steve will be talking about
the technologies that we should be tracking in the next 5 years and that
will make supercomputers even more super in the years to come.
For the symposium's second session, "Existing Applications of Super-
computers in Industry," we have selected three different corporations that
are using supercomputers in rather different fashions to maintain and in-
crease their competitive position in the world's marketplace. Of the three,
Apple Computer, Inc. is the one that actually owns its own supercomputer.
Eastman Kodak Company has access to supercomputing through the NCSA
and is doing interesting work onsite at Kodak with different kinds of ma-
chines, and Abbott Laboratories is in the process of deciding what to do
about supercomputing.
Our first speaker in the second session is Beverly Eccles, a group
leader in computational chemistry at Abbott Laboratories who is on the
project team evaluating supercomputers for Abbott. She obtained her
Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from the University of California at Irvine,
and she has been at Abbott for 2 years. Previously she was at the Beckman
Research Institute of the City of Hope, where she did image analysis.
Cliff Perry, who represents Eastman Kodak Company in the second
session, obtained his Ph.D. from Purdue University and then became a
member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota. For the last 20
years he has been with Kodak in a variety of very interesting positions
and was until recently the director of Kodak's Computational Science
Laboratory. Kodak is probably one of the few corporations in America
that has a computational science laboratory. Now he is the director of the
Information and Computing Technologies Division, which oversees Kodak's
Computational Science Laboratory.
Larry Tester, whose degree is from Stanford University, will discuss
supercomputer use at Apple Computer, Inc. He was a member of the leg-
endary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center group, that troop of very excep-
tional people who generated many of the modern ideas about workstation-
human interfaces and hardware construction. He joined Apple in 1980 and
is currently vice president for advanced technologies.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
science laboratory
