Impediments to Industrial Use of Supercomputers

Supercomputers have been used to great competitive advantage throughout many industries (Erisman and Neves 1987). The road to changing a company from one that merely uses computers on routine tasks to one that employs the latest, most powerful machines as research and industrial tools to improve profit is a difficult one indeed. The barriers include technical, financial, and cultural issues that are often complex; and even more consternating, once addressed, they can often reappear over time. The solution to these issues requires both management and technologists in a cooperative effort. We begin with what are probably the most difficult issues—cultural and financial barriers.

The cultural barriers that prevent supercomputing from taking its rightful place in the computing venue abound. Topping the list is management understanding of supercomputing's impact on the bottom line. Management education in this area is sorely needed, as most managers who have wrestled with these issues attest. Dr. Hermann, one of the panelists in this session, suggested that a successful "sell" to management must include a financial-benefits story that very few people can develop. To tell this story one must be a technologist who understands the specific technical contributions computing can have on both a company's product/processes and its corporate competitive and profit goals. Of the few technologists who have this type of overview, how many would take on what could be a two-year "sell" to management? History can attest that almost every successful supercomputer placement in industry, government, or academia has rested on the shoulders of a handful of zealots or champions with that rare vision. This is often true of expensive research-tool investments, but for computing it is more difficult because of the relative infancy of the industry. Most upper-level managers have not personally experienced the effective use of research computing. When they came up through the "ranks," computing, if it existed at all, was little more than a glorified engineering calculator (slide rule). Managers in the aerospace industry fully understand the purpose of a $100 million investment in a wind tunnel, but until only in the last few years did any of them have to grapple with a $20 million investment in a "numerical" wind tunnel. Continuing with this last aerospace example, how did the culture change? An indispensable ally in the aerospace

industry's education process has been the path-finding role of NASA, in both technology and collaboration with industry. We will explore government-industry collaboration further in the next section.

Cultural issues are not all management in nature. As an example, consider the increasing need for collaborative (design-build) work and multidisciplinary analysis. In these areas, supercomputing can be the most important tool in creating an environment that allows tremendous impact on the bottom line, as described above. However, quite often the disciplines that need to cooperate are represented by different (often large) organizations. Nontechnical impediments associated with change of any kind arise, such as domain protection, fear of loss of control, and career insecurities owing to unfamiliarity with computing technology. Often these concerns are never stated but exist at a subliminal level. In addition, organizations handle computing differently, often on disparate systems with incompatible geometric description models, and the technical barriers from years of cultural separation are very real indeed.

Financial barriers can be the most frustrating of all. Supercomputers, almost as part of their definition, are expensive. They cost from $10 to $30 million and thus are usually purchased at the corporate level. The expense of this kind of acquisition is often distributed by some financial mechanism that assigns that cost to those who use it. Therein lies the problem. To most users, their desk, pencils, paper, phone, desk-top computer, etc., are simply there. For example, there is no apparent charge to them, their project, or their management when they pick up the phone. Department-level minicomputers, while a visible expense, are controlled at a local level, and the expenses are well understood and accepted before purchase. Shared corporate resources, however, look completely different. They often cost real project dollars. To purchase X dollars of computer time from the company central resource costs a project X dollars of labor. This tradeoff applies pressure to use the least amount of central computing resources possible. This is like asking an astronomer to look through his telescope only when absolutely necessary for the shortest time possible while hoping he discovers a new and distant galaxy.

This same problem has another impact that is more subtle. Supercomputers like the Cray Research machines often involve multiple CPUs. Most charging formulas involve CPU time as a parameter. Consequently, if one uses a supercomputer with the mind set of keeping costs down, one would likely use only one CPU at a time. After all, a good technologist knows that if he uses eight CPUs, Amdahl's law will probably only let him get the "bang" of six or seven and then only if he

is clever. What is the result? A corporation buys an eight-CPU supercomputer to finally tackle corporate grand-challenge problems, and the users immediately bring only the power of one CPU to bear on their problems for financial reasons. Well, one-eighth of a supercomputer is not a supercomputer, and one might opt for a lesser technological solution. In fact, this argument is often heard in industry today by single-CPU users grappling with financial barriers. This is particularly frustrating since the cost-reduction analysis is often well understood, and the loss in product design quality by solving problems on less competitive equipment is often not even identified!

The technological barriers are no less challenging. In fact, one should point out that the financial billing question relative to parallel processing will probably require a technological assist from vendors in their hardware and operating systems. To manage the computing resource properly, accounting "hooks" in a parallel environment need be more sophisticated. Providing the proper incentives to use parallel equipment when the overhead of parallelization is a real factor is not a simple matter. These are issues the vendors can no longer leave to the user but must become a partner in solving.

Supercomputers in industry have not really "engaged" the corporate enterprise computing scene. Computers have had a long history in most companies and are an integral part of daily processes in billing, CAD/CAM, data storage, scheduling, etc. Supercomputers have been brought into companies by a select group and for a specific need, usually in design analysis. These systems, like these organizations, are often placed "over there"—in a corner, an ivory tower, another building, another campus, or any place where they don't get in the way. Consequently, most of the life stream of the corporation, its product data, is out of reach, often electronically and culturally from the high-performance computing complex. The opportunities for supercomputing alluded to in the previous section suggest that supercomputers must be integrated into the corporate computing system. All contact with the central computing network begins at the workstation. From that point a supercomputer must be as available as any other computing resource. To accomplish this, a number of technical barriers must be overcome, such as

• transparent use,

• software-rich environment,

• visualization of results, and

• access to data.

If one delves into these broad and overlapping categories, a number of issues arise. Network topology, distributed computing strategy, and

standards for data storage and transport immediately spring to mind. Anyone who has looked at any of these issues knows the solutions require management and political savvy, as well as technical solutions. At a deeper level of concern are the issues of supercomputer behavior. On the one hand, when a large analysis application is to be run, the supercomputer must bring as much of its resources to bear on the computation as possible (otherwise it is not a supercomputer). On the other hand, if it is to be an equal partner on a network, it must be responsive to the interactive user. These are conflicting goals. Perhaps supercomputers on a network need a network front end, for example, to be both responsive and powerful. Who decides this issue? The solution to this conflict is not solely the responsibility of the vendor. Yet, left unresolved, this issue alone could "kill" supercomputer usage in any industrial environment.

As supercomputer architectures become increasingly more complex, the ability to transfer existing software to them becomes a pacing issue. If existing programs do not run at all or do not run fast on new computers, these machines simply will not be purchased. This problem, of course, is a classic problem of high-end computing. Vectorization and now parallelization are processes that we know we must contend with. The issue of algorithms and the like is well understood. There is a cultural issue for technologists, however. The need to be 100 per cent efficient on a parallel machine lessens as the degree of parallelism grows. For example, if we have two $20 million computers, and one runs a problem at 90 per cent efficiency at a sustained rate of four GFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second), and the other runs a problem at 20 per cent efficiency at 40 GFLOPS, which would you choose? I would choose the one that got the job done the cheapest! (That can not be determined from the data given! For example, at 40 GFLOPS, the second computer might be using an algorithm that requires 100 times more floating-point operations to reach the same answer. Let us assume that this is not the case and that both computers are actually using the same algorithm.) The second computer might be favored. It probably is a computer that uses many parallel CPUs. How do we charge for the computer time? How do we account for the apparently wasted cycles? I ask these two questions to emphasize that, at all times, the corporate resource must be "accounted" for with well-understood accounting practices that are consistent with corporate and government regulations!

We have paid short shrift to technological issues, owing to time and space. It is hoped that one point has become clear—that the cultural, financial, and technical issues are quite intertwined. Their resolution and

the acceptance of high-end computing tools in industry will require collaboration and technology transfer among all sectors—government, industry, and academia.