Policy Issues

Supporting Circuit and Packaging Technology

There is an impression that the Japanese manufacturers provide access to their latest and fastest high-speed circuitry to build supercomputers. For example, CONVEX gets the parts from Fujitsu for making cost-effective minisupercomputers, but these parts are not components of fast-clock, highest-speed supercomputers. The CONVEX clock is two to 10 times slower when compared with a Cray, Fujitsu, Hitachi, or NEC mainframe or super.

High-speed circuitry and interconnect packaging that involves researchers, semiconductor companies, and computer manufacturers must be supported. This effort is needed to rebuild the high-speed circuitry infrastructure. We should develop mechanisms whereby high-speed-logic R&D is supported by those who need it. Without such circuitry, traditional vector supercomputers cannot be built. Here are some things that might be done:

1. Know where the country stands vis-à-vis circuitry and packaging. Neil Lincoln described two developments at NEC in 1990—the SX-3 is running benchmark programs at a 1.9-nanosecond clock; one

processor of an immersion-cooled GaAs supercomputer is operating at a 0.9-nanosecond clock.

2. Provide strong and appropriate support for the commercial suppliers who can and will deliver in terms of quality, performance, and cost. This infrastructure must be rebuilt to be competitive with Japanese suppliers. The Department of Defense's (DoD's) de facto industrial policy appears to support a small cadre of incompetent suppliers (e.g., Honeywell, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, Unisys, and Westinghouse) who have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to supply industrial-quality, cost-effective, high-performance semiconductors. The VHSIC program institutionalized the policy of using bucks to support the weak suppliers.

3. Build MOSIS facilities for the research and industrial community to use to explore all the high-speed technologies, including ECL, GaAs, and Josephson junctions. This would encourage a foundry structure to form that would support both the research community and manufacturers.

4. Make all DoD-funded semiconductor facilities available and measured via MOSIS. Eliminate and stop supporting the poor ones.

5. Support foundries aimed at custom high-speed parts that would improve density and clock speeds. DEC's Sam Fuller (a Session 13 presenter) described a custom, 150-watt ECL microprocessor that would operate at one nanosecond. Unfortunately, this research effort's only effect is likely to be a demonstration proof for competitors.

6. Build a strong packaging infrastructure for the research and startup communities to use, including gaining access to any industrial packages from Cray, DEC, IBM, and Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation.

7. Convene the supercomputer makers and companies who could provide high-speed circuitry and packaging. Ask them what's needed to provide high-performance circuits.

Supers and Security

For now, the supercomputer continues to be a protected species because of its use in defense. Also, like the Harley Davidson, it has become a token symbol of trade and competitiveness, as the Japanese manufacturers have begun to make computers with peak speeds equal to or greater than those from Cray Research or Cray Computer. No doubt, nearly all the functions supers perform for defense could be carried out more cheaply by using the alternative forms of computing described above.

Supers for Competitiveness

Large U.S. corporations are painstakingly slow, reluctant shoppers when it comes to big, traditional computers like supercomputers, mainframes, and even minisupercomputers. It took three years, for example, for a leading U.S. chemical company to decide to spring for a multimillion-dollar CRAY X-MP. And the entire U.S. automotive industry, which abounds in problems like crashworthiness studies that are ideal candidates for high-performance computers, has less supercomputer power than just one of its Japanese competitors. The super is right for the Japanese organization because a facility can be installed rapidly and in a top-down fashion.

U.S. corporations are less slow to adopt distributed computing by default. A small, creative, and productive part of the organization can and does purchase small machines to enhance their productivity. Thus, the one to 10 per cent of the U.S.-based organization that is responsible for 90 to 95 per cent of a corporation's output can and does benefit. For example, today, almost all electronic CAD is done using workstations, and the product gestation time is reduced for those companies who use these modern tools. A similar revolution in design awaits other engineering disciplines such as mechanical engineering and chemistry—but they must start.

The great gain for productivity is by visualization that comes through interactive supercomputing substitutes, including the personal supercomputers that will appear in the next few years. A supercomputer is likely to increase the corporate bureaucracy and at the same time inhibit users from buying the right computer—the very users who must produce the results!

By far, the greatest limitation in the use of supercomputing is training. The computer-science community, which, by default, takes on much of the training for computer programming, is not involved in supercomputing. Only now are departments becoming interested in the highly parallel computers that will form the basis of this next (fifth) generation of computing.