Supercomputing since 1983
Lincoln Faurer
Lincoln D. Faurer signed on with the Corporation for Open Systems (COS) International on April 7, 1986, as its first employee. Mr. Faurer is a voting ex officio member of the COS Board of Directors and Executive Committee. As Chair of the COS Strategy Forum, Mr. Faurer coordinates and recommends the overall technical direction of COS, and in his role as President and Chief Executive Officer, he oversees the day-to-day business affairs of the company.
Mr. Faurer came to COS after retiring from a distinguished 35-year Air Force career, where he achieved the rank of Lieutenant General. In 1986, President Reagan awarded the National Security Award to Lt. Gen. Faurer for "exemplary performance of duty and distinguished service" as the Director of the National Security Agency from April 1, 1981, through March 31, 1985. Mr. Faurer's prior positions in the Air Force included Deputy Chairman, NATO Military Committee, and Director of Intelligence, Headquarters, U.S. European Command.
Mr. Faurer is a graduate of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and George Washington University in Washington, DC .
I suspect that we all pleasure ourselves occasionally by looking back on events with which we proudly identify, and one such event for me was the establishment of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) Supercomputer Research Center. It was an idea spawned by the predecessor to this meeting in 1983, the first Frontiers of Supercomputing conference. A number of us from NSA left that meeting a little bit taken aback by what we perceived as a lack of a sense of urgency on the part of the government people who were in attendance at that session. Sitting where we did at NSA, we thought there was a lot more urgency to the supercomputer field and therefore set about to create a proposal that culminated in the establishment of a Supercomputer Research Center, which we ended up having to fund alone.
Therefore, it was really a pleasure when I was asked if I would play the role of presiding over one of the sessions at this conference. This session is designed to treat successes and failures, and the latter, I do believe, outnumber the former by a wide margin. But even the so-called failures can spawn successes. In any event, it is the things that are learned that matter, and they matter if we are willing to use what we learn and change.
The objectives of the 1983 conference were to bring together the best in government and industry to understand the directions that technology and requirements were taking. Yet, it was a different industry at that time—small but totally dominant, with a still reasonably healthy U.S. microelectronics industry to support it. That, certainly, now has changed. More foreign competition, tougher technological demands to satisfy, weaker U.S. support industry, microelectronics, storage, etc., affect us now.
So in 1983 at NSA, in addition to starting the Supercomputer Research Center, we made an announcement of intent to buy a heterogeneous element processor from Denelcor. It was their first advance sale. NSA took delivery and struggled for almost a year to get the machine up—our first UNIX four-processor system. However, it did not become operational, and Denelcor subsequently went under. The point is that we took a chance on a new architecture and lost out in the process but learned an important lesson: do not let a firm, even a new one, try to complete the development process in an operational setting.
We could not foresee all the changes of the past seven years at the 1983 conference—the changes in Cray Research, Inc., the loss of Engineering Technology Associates Systems, the loss of Evans & Sutherland supercomputer division, the loss of Denelcor, etc. The major difference
is that in 1983, the government market underpinned the industry, certainly to a different extent than today. As of 1990, this is no longer true. The government continues to set the highest demands and is still probably the technological leader, but its market does not and cannot sustain the industry. The supercomputer industry is turning increasingly to an industrial market, an academic market, and foreign markets. Strong pressures from Japan are certainly being encountered in the international marketplace.
One wonders, where will we be seven years from now? What will have occurred that we did not expect? I certainly hope that seven years from now we are not as bad off as some of the current discussion would suggest we could be if we do not do anything right.
Looking back over the past seven years, a number of important developments should not be overlooked.
First, there is a strong trend toward open systems. It is within a niche of that open-systems world that I reside at the Corporation for Open Systems. Second, the evolution of UNIX as a cornerstone of high-performance computer operating systems has lots of pluses and a few minuses. Third, growth of low-end systems, coupled with high-performance workstations, often now with special accelerator boards, has led to truly distributed high-performance computing in many environments. Fourth is the appearance, or imminent appearance, of massively parallel systems with some promise of higher performance at lower cost than traditional serial and vector processing architectures. What remains to be seen is if they can turn the corner from interesting machines to general-purpose systems.
Almost all of this is to the good. Some would argue that high-performance computing does remain the research province of the U.S., by and large. Whether you accept that or not, it is critically important that we dominate the world market with U.S. machines based on U.S. research and composed, at least mostly, of U.S. parts. Aside from the obvious economic reasons for that, it is very important to the nation's security and to the survival of U.S. leadership in areas like aerospace, energy exploration, and genetic research for world scientific prominence.