The Future of Computing Performance Game Over or Next Level? (2011) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Need for Continued Performance Growth
1 The Need for Continued Performance Growth
Pages 21-52
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leadership in IT depends in no small part on its driving and taking advantage of the leading edge of computing performance. Virtually every sector of society -- manufacturing, financial services, education, science, government, military, entertainment, and so on -- has become dependent on the continued growth in computing performance to drive new efficiencies and innovations.
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report, although it does not focus specifically on computing performance, provides numerous examples of ways in which computation technology and IT are critical underpinnings of virtually every aspect of health care (NRC, 2009, Computational Technology for Effective Health Care: Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php? record_ id=12572)
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In fact, the increasing amounts of data that are generated, stored, indexed, and retrieved require continued performance improvements. See Box 1.1 for more on data as a performance driver.
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Satellite cameras and other remote sensing devices typically collect much more data than can be examined for use ful information or important events. Considerably more progress is needed to achieve the vision described by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 paper about a MEMEX device that would collect and make available to users all the information relevant to their life and work.1 1Vannevar Bush, 1945, "As we may think," Atlantic Magazine, July 1945, available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/.
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Whole fields of human endeavors have been transformed as computer system capability has ascended through various threshold performance values.5 The impact of computer technology is so widespread that it is nearly impossible to overstate its importance. Faster computers create not just the ability to do old things faster but the ability to do new things that were not feasible at all before.6 Fast computers have enabled cell phones, MP3 players, and global positioning devices; Internet search engines and worldwide online auctions; MRI and CT scanners; and handheld PDAs and wireless networks.
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In effect, we all get faster yet.7 There is no reason to think that it will not continue as long as computers continue to improve. What has changed -- and will be described in detail in later chapters -- is how we achieve faster computers.
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Finding: The information technology sector itself and most other sec tors of society -- for example, manufacturing, financial and other services, science, engineering, education, defense and other government services, and entertainment -- have become dependent on continued growth in computing performance. The rest of this chapter describes a sampling of fields in which computing performance has been critical and in which a slowing of the growth of computing performance would have serious adverse repercussions.
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The reality is that modern computing systems spend nearly all their time idle (see Box 1.2 for an explanation of why faster computers are needed despite that) ; thus, most systems have a substantial amount of excess computing capacity, which can be put to use in other ways.
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Many scientific fields are ripe for multiphysics simulations 8 See an NRC report for one relatively recent take on computing and the sciences (NRC, 2008, The Potential Impact of High-End Capability Computing on Four Illustrative Fields of Science and Engineering, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php? record_id=12451)
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More information about these workshops and others is available online at DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research website, http://www. er.doe.gov/ascr/WorkshopsConferences/WorkshopsConferences.html.
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vi. 12 NRC, 2003, Beyond the Molecular Frontier: Challenges for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, available online at http:// www.nap.edu/catalog.php?
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The goal is no longer to sequence a single species but to scoop organisms from a pond or ocean, from soil, or from deep 13 Horst Simon, Thomas Zacharia, and Rick Stevens, 2007, Modeling and Simulation at the Exascale for the Energy and Environment, Report on the Advanced Scientific Comput ing Research Town Hall Meetings on Simulation and Modeling at the Exascale for Energy, Ecological Sustainability and Global Security (E3) , Washington, D.C.: DOE, available online at http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/ProgramDocuments/Docs/TownHall.pdf.
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The National Research Council has also recently released three reports noting that strong evidence on climate change underscores the need for actions to reduce emissions and begin adapting to impacts (NRC, 2010, Advancing the Science of Climate Change, Limiting the Magnitude of Climate Change, and Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php? record_id=12782; NRC, 2010, Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?
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17 DOE, 2009, Scientific Grand Challenges: Challenges in Climate Change Science and the Role of Computing at the Extreme Scale, Workshop Report, Washington D.C., Novem ber 6-7, 2008, available online at http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/ProgramDocuments/Docs/ ClimateReport.pdf.
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A slowdown in the growth in computing performance has implications for large swaths of scientific endeavor. The amount of data available and accessible for scientific purposes will only grow, and computational capability needs to keep up if the data are to be used most effectively.
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This section describes several examples of where continued growth in computing performance is essential for effectiveness. The examples span homeland security, defense, and intelligence and have many obvious nonmilitary applications as well.
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Army conducts squad-level joint video-game simulations as a research exercise. Squad tactics, communication, identification of poorly illuminated 18 Reportedin Earnest Cavalli, 2008, Man imitates America's army, saves lives, Wired.com, January 18, 2008, available online at http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/01/americasarmy-t/.
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Future training simulations could be made much more realistic, given enough computational capability, by combining accurately portrayed audio (the real sound of real weapons with echos, nulls, and reflections generated by computer) with ever-improving graphics.
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Humans are susceptible to a wide array of malfunctions in that role: they get distracted, they get tired, they get sick, and their effectiveness varies from one person to another. Although it can be argued that there should always be a human in the loop when it is humans one is trying to outsmart, it seems clear that this is an opportunity for increased computational horsepower to augment a human's ability to identify threat patterns in the images.
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If a camera were smart enough to be able to filter out all the normal, noninteresting events, identifying interesting events would be easier. Although it may be desirable to carry out as much analysis at the camera as possible to reduce the network bandwidth required, the camera may not be constructed in a way that uses much power (for example, it may not have cooling features)
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All those can be used by the search facility to narrow down the possibilities to the point where you can scan a list and find the one the document that you wanted. Faster computer systems will permit much better automated filtering and searching, and even pictures that have not been predesignated with key search words may still be analyzed for the presence of a person or item of interest.
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Continued performance improvements are needed if the agencies are to
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22 For a list of the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world, see "Top 500," available online at http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/TOP500.
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The flood of data from sensors, computers, research labs, cameras, phones and the like surpassed the capac ity of storage technologies in 2007" (Data, data, everywhere: A special report on managing information, The Economist, February 25, 2010, available online at http://www.economist. com/displaystory.cfm?
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Varian, 2003, How much information? , available online at http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/index.htm, last accessed November 2, 2010.
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Each such iteration normally narrows the original modeling gap, and this in turn requires additional computational capability. The larger the original gap, the more computa tion is needed to bridge it.
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In addition, massive amounts of data and computational capability accessible on the Internet have increased the demand for Web services, or "software as a service," in a variety of sectors. Analytics and 28 For more on emerging applications and their need for computational capability, see Justin Rattner, 2009, The dawn of terascale computing, IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine 1(1)
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Real-time 29 IBM's Smart Analytics System, for example, is developing solutions aimed at retail, insurance, banking, health care, and telecommunication. For more information see the IBM Smart Analytics System website, available online at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ data/infosphere/smart-analytics-system/.
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The com puting system that can meet those performance requirements needs to be not only extremely powerful but also extremely cost-efficient so that the business model behind the Internet service remains viable. The appetite of Internet services for additional computing performance doesn't appear to have a foreseeable limit.
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The benefits to society at large from overcoming language barriers would arguably rival any other single technologic achievement in human history, especially if they extended to speech-to-speech real-time systems. The prospect of mobile computing systems -- such as cell phones, vehicle computers, and media players -- that are increasingly powerful, ubiquitous, and interconnected adds another set of opportunities for bet 30 See Google's announcement: Google begins move to universal search: Google introduces new search features and unveils new homepage design," Press Release, Google.com, May 16, 2007, available online at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/universalsearch_20070516.html.
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On top of the massive amounts of data being created daily and all that portends for computational needs, the combination of three elements has the potential to deliver a massive increase in real-time computa tional resources targeted toward end-user devices constrained by cost and power: 31 See the University of California, Berkeley, press release about this experiment (Sarah Yang, 2008, Joint Nokia research project captures traffic data using GPS-enabled cell phones, Press Release, UC Berkeley News, February 8, 2008, available online at http://berkeley.edu/ news/media/releases/2008/02/08_gps.shtml)
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The realization of such a vision of connected computing will require not only increased computing performance but standardization of network software layers. Standardization should make it easy to build and share unstructured data and application program ming interfaces (APIs)
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