High Performance Comput ing IAnd Communications Week I K1N.G COMMUNICATIONS GROUP, INC. 627 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 638-4260 Fax: (202) 662-9744 Thursday, July 8,1993 Volume 2, Number 27 Gordon Bell Makes His Case: Get The Feds out Of Computer Architecture BY RICHARD McCORMACK It's an issue that has been simmering, then smolder- Bell: "You've got ing and occasionally flaring up: will the big massively huge forces tellmg parallel machines costing tens of millions of dollars you who's malnl~ne prove themselves worthy of their promise? Or will and how you bu~ld these machines, developed with millions of dollars computers " from the taxpayer, be an embarrassing bust? It's a debate that occurs daily-even with spouses in bed at night-but not much outside of the high- performance computing industry's small borders. Lit- erally thousands of people are engaged in trying to make massive parallelism a viable technology. But there are still few objective observers, very little data, and not enough experience with the big machines to prove-or disprove-their true worth. afraid to talk about [the situation] because they know Interestingly, though, one of the biggest names in they've conned the world and they have to keep lying computing has made up his mind. The MPPs are aw- to support" their assertions that the technology needs ful, and the companies selling them, notably Intel and government support, says the ever-quotable Bell. "It's Thinking Machines, but others as well, are bound to really bad when it turns the scientists into a bunch of fail, says Gordon Bell, whose name is attached to the liars. " most prestigious award in parallel computing. Bell, 58, who sponsors two, $1,000 awards each year These big, massively parallel computers "are crap," for achievement in parallel computing, is a recipient of he says. Worse, "the scientific community is basically rCorr:inued on page 3.' 2 Thursday, July 8, 1993 HPCC WEEK IEEE Picks Gordon Bell Prize Finalists The finalists for the cent, to 7.5 GFhhnillion Laboratory for "45 Giga- Paul Oppenheimer of 1993 Gordon Bell Prize dollars." flops Molecular Dynamics Thinking Machines Corp. for significant achieve- on the Connection for "Parallel Execution of "I want to congratulate Machine 5:" a Fortran 77 Weather ment in parallel processing them on reaching 60 giga- were named last week, and Prediction Model;" flops," says Gordon Bell L. Long and M. Ka- And Cray Research by all indications, the on Tuesday afternoon. mon of Pennsylvania award is growing in popu- for the numerous entries "That's about 50 percent State University and D. that utilized the compa- larity. There were 23 en- of the peak on the [CM-51, Dahl, M. Bromley, R. tries in this year's compe- ny's C90 supercomputer. so that's great.. .The users Lordi, J. Myczkowski and "These entries were too tition, nearly double that are finally getting some- R. Shapiro of Thinking of any previous year. close in overall quality for thing out of the com- Machines Corp. for "A the judges to pick the most Moreover, the perfor- puter." Deterministic Parallel Al- outstanding one, so the gorithm to Solve a Model mance reported by the top Those making the fifth finalist is Cray entry was more than eight Boltzmann Equation;" Research," says the IEEE. award say that the number Robert Means, Bret times that of the previous and quality of the submis- It is the first time that a best, reports the IEEE Wallach and David Busby company has been hon- sions, as well as the in- of HNC Inc. and Robert Computer Society, which creased performance of ored in the Gordon Bell administers the award. Lengel of Tracor Applied Prize competition. thc machines, are "indica- Sciences for "Bispectrum Two entries exceeded 60 tive of the rapid progress For more information, billion floating-point Signal Processing on contact the IEEE's Mari- in the application of paral- HNC's SIMD Numerical operations per second. lel processing to scientific lyn Potes at 714- 821 -8380. "More significantly," Array Processor;" and engineering prob- Gary Sabot, Skef says the IEEE, " 12 entries lems." achieved sustained rates Wholey, Jonas Berlin and exceeding 25 percent of The 1993 finalists are: the theoretical peak per- formance of the machines P.S. Lomdahl, P. they ran on. Tamayo. N. Gronbech- Priceherformance im- Jensen and D.M. Beazley proved by almost 600 per- of Los Alamos National HPCC WEEK Thursday, July 8, 1993 Gomlon Be//Makes His Caser.r (From front, the 1991 National Medal of Technology, awarded to good computers." He goes on to say, however, that it him by President Bush. "Bell has displayed more is "not fair to society to have to fund their learn- vision than any other computer designer in the field, in ing ...as a taxpayer with a growing tax burden, I don't the area of understanding how a particular archi- want to continue this funding." tecture, as yet not created, could address an important It is people like Bell who keep the computer industry set of requirements of a broad community," says the fresh and alive. Larry Smarr, director of the National U.S. Department of Commerce in its Medal of Tech- Center for Supercomputing Applications, describes nology citation. Bell, his former boss at the National Science Founda- Bell sat down with HPCC Week editor Richard tion as "incredibly conflicted." But the computer in- McCormack at his home recently in Los Altos, Calif., dustry itself is "incredibly conflicted." And thank and spoke about where he thinks the industry is goodness; without conflict or chaos there is no creati- headed. While he is not very bullish on the prospects vity or progress. It is what keeps the industry so hea- of those companies making message-passing multi- lthy and vibrant. computers, he does think there will be an explosion in HPCC Week last week shared Gordon Bell's clustered workstations and shared memory computers. thoughts with the executives of Thinking Machines He is particularly fond of Kendall Square Research, a and Intel and asked for their responses, which are pub- company for which he works occasionally as a consul- lished in full. We also interviewed the tant. users of the big new CM-5 at Los Alamos National No doubt, there will be plenty of people who may Laboratory and the Paragon at Oak Ridge National wince when they read Bell's remarks on the inside Laboratory, and will present their stories separately in pages of this publication (including Bell). But he says next week's issue. It should be noted now, however, in a recent paper he has written on government sup- that both users insist their machines are experimental, port of computer companies that "my attack on State and that it is still too early to pass judgment on them. Computers is unfortunately taken as an attack on We invite any of our readers to respond to Bell's people and their organizations. It shouldn't be, be- comments. Call Richard McCormack at 202-662-9721. cause the designers are all bright enough and given Bell can be reached at 415-949-2735. enough time and money will eventually learn to design .% Question: You've become an outspoken critic of DAR- Fine. These are all bright people and given enough PA's computing program. Yet money, bright people can be educated or produce there are a number of out- something useful. These people are kindergarten standina DARPA-funded suc- architects, for which we pay a large amount to fund cess stories: SUN, MIPS and the bastards. Silicon Graphics, for instance. I'm not against specialized computers. But when Bell: Those companies are the product of the way to vou're ~uttinga lot of money into it and a lot of people do it. But it isn't 10years ago, because SUN is 1 1 are prosramming and reprogramming it, then you years old now. There are some Al companies started have to think if any of these have any generality to it. in the last decade around Carnegie [Mellon Universi- ty]. But if I were DARPA I would worry about getting Q: So what happens to them? together some good recent success stories. Bell: What happens to basically all the multicom- puter guys is they're all going to get wiped out by 0:Thinking Machines is one. AIM and plain old computers because if you strip the Bell: That's a massive failure because here you've machines down to their bare nothing, sitting there is got $350 to $500 million that has been poured into basically a simple computer and a high-speed switch. that all together, from DARPA, investors and from Guess what? ATM is a high-speed switch. government purchases. If you look at the amount of The only thing that is going to save them is if ATM work output and look at whether any taxes have been doesn't come in very fast or isn't as good. But over returned other than payroll taxes-hey I want these time, plain old switches and plain old computers con- systems to pay back financially -then Thinking nected together just eliminate the special machines. Machines is easy. I just look at the financial return of that and I'd say it was an absolute disaster. Q: Even with the problems of latency and It's a little over 10years old and they haven't paid bandwidth? Bell: There are ATM switches on the market that back. My guess is that lntel is way in the hole on its have the bandwidth and latency of the switches that venture.