Current Status of Supercomputing in the United States

Erich Bloch

Erich Bloch serves as a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Competitiveness. Previously, he was the Director of the National Science Foundation. Early in his career, in the 1960s, Erich worked with the National Security Agency as the Program Manager of the IBM Stretch project, helping to build the fastest machine that could be built at that time for national security applications. At IBM, Erich was a strong leader in high-performance computing and was one of the key people who started the Semiconductor Research Cooperative.

Eric is chairman of the new Physical Sciences, Math, and Engineering Committee (an organ of the Federal Coordinating Committee on Science, Engineering, and Technology), which has responsibility for high-performance computing. He is also a member of the National Advisory Committee on Semiconductors and has received the National Medal of Technology from the President.

I appreciate this opportunity to talk about supercomputing and computers and technology. This is a topic of special interest to you, the National Science Foundation, and the nation.

But it is also a topic of personal interest to me. In fact, the Los Alamos Synchrotron Laboratory has special meaning for me. It was my second home during the late fifties and early sixties, when I was manager of IBM's Stretch Design and Engineering group.

How the world has changed! We had two-megabit—not megabyte—core memories, two circuit/plug-in units with a cycle time of 200 nanoseconds. Also, in pipelining, we had the first "interrupt mechanisms" and "look-ahead mechanisms."

But some things have stayed the same: cost overruns, not meeting specs, disappointing performance, missed schedules! It seems that these are universal rules of supercomputing.

But enough of this. What I want to do is talk about the new global environment, changes brought about by big computers and computer science, institutional competition, federal science and technology, and policy issues.

The Global Imperative

Never before have scientific knowledge and technology been so clearly coupled with economic prosperity and an improved standard of living. Where access to natural resources was once a major source of economic success, today access to technology—which means access to knowledge—is probably more important. Industries based primarily on knowledge and fast-moving technologies—such as semiconductors, biotechnology, and information technologies—are becoming the new basic industries fueling economic growth.

Advances in information technologies and computers have revolutionized the transfer of information, rendering once impervious national borders open to critical new knowledge. As the pace of new discoveries and new knowledge picks up, the speed at which knowledge can be accessed becomes a decisive factor in the commercial success of technologies.

Increasing global economic integration has become an undeniable fact. Even large nations must now look outward and deal with a world economy. Modern corporations operate internationally to an extent that was undreamed of 40 years ago. That's because it would have been impossible to operate the multinational corporations of today without modern information, communications, and transportation technologies.

Moreover, many countries that were not previously serious players in the world economy are now competitors. Global economic integration has been accompanied by a rapid diffusion of technological capability in the form of technically educated people. The United States, in a dominant position in nearly all technologies at the end of World War II, is now only one producer among many. High-quality products now come from

countries that a decade or two ago traded mainly in agricultural products or raw materials.

Our technical and scientific strength will be challenged much more directly than in the past. Our institutions must learn to function in this environment. This will not be easy.

Importance of Computers—The Knowledge Economy

Amid all this change, computing has become a symbol for our creativity and productivity and a barometer in the effort to maintain our competitive position in the world arena. The development of the computer, and its spread through industry, government, and education, has brought forth the emergence of knowledge as the critical new commodity in today's global economy. In fact, computers and computer science have become the principal enabling technology of the knowledge economy.

Supercomputers, in particular, are increasingly important to design and manufacturing processes in diverse industries: oil exploration, aeronautics and aerospace, pharmaceuticals, energy, transportation, automobiles, and electronics, just to name the most obvious examples. They have become an essential instrument in the performance of research, a new tool to be used alongside modeling, experimentation, and theory, that pushes the frontiers of knowledge, generates new ideas, and creates new fields. They are also making it possible to take up old problems—like complex-systems theory, approaches to nonlinear systems, genome mapping, and three-dimensional modeling of full aircraft configurations—that were impractical to pursue in the past.

We are only in the beginning of a general exploitation of supercomputers that will profoundly affect academia, industry, and the service sector. During the first 30 years of their existence, computers fostered computer science and engineering and computer  architecture . More recently, we have seen the development of computational science and engineering as a means of performing sophisticated research and design tasks. Supercomputer technology and network and graphics technology, coupled with mathematical methods for algorithms, are the basis for this development.

Also, we have used the von Neumann  architecture  for a long time. Only recently is a new approach in massive parallelism developing. The practical importance of supercomputers will continue to increase as their technological capabilities advance, their user access improves, and their use becomes more simple.

Computers—A Historic Perspective

Let's follow the development of computing for a moment. The computer industry is an American success story—the product of our ingenuity and of a period of unquestioned market and technological leadership in the first three and a half decades after World War II.

What did we do right?

First, we had help from historical events. World War II generated research needs and a cooperative relationship among government, academia, and the fledgling computer industry. Government support of computer research was driven by the Korean War and the Cold War. Federal funding was plentiful, and it went to commercially oriented firms capable of exploiting the technology for broader markets.

But we had other things going for us as well. There were important parallel developments and cross-feeding between electronics, materials, and electromechanics. There was a human talent base developed during the war. There was job mobility, as people moved from government labs to industry and universities, taking knowledge of the new technologies with them.

There was also a supportive business climate. U.S. companies that entered the field—IBM, Sperry Corporation, National Cash Register, Burroughs—were able to make large capital investments. And there was an entrepreneurial infrastructure eager to exploit new ideas.

Manufacturing and early automation attempts had a revolutionary impact on the progress of computer development. It's not fully appreciated that the mass production of 650s, 1401s, and later, 7090s and 360s set the cost/performance curve of computers on its precipitous decline and assured technology preeminence.

Industry leaders were willing to take risks and play a hunch. Marketing forecasts did not justify automation; IBM proceeded on faith and demonstrated that the forecasts were consistently on the low side. A typical assessment of the time was that "14 supercomputers can satisfy the world demand."

We had another thing going for us—our university research enterprise. Coupling research and education in the universities encouraged human talent at the forefront of the computer field and created computer departments at the cutting edge of design and construction: Illinois, MIT, IAS, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Clearly, it was the right mix of elements. But there was nothing inevitable about our successful domination of the field for the last 30 years. That was partly attributable to the failures of our competitors.

England provides a good case study of what can go wrong. It had the same basic elements we had:

• the right people (Turing, Kilburn);

• good universities (Manchester, Cambridge, Edinburgh); and

• some good companies (Ferranti, Lyons).

So why did it not compete with us in this vital industry? One reason, again, is history. World War II had a much more destructive effect on Britain than on us. But there were more profound reasons. The British government was not aggressive in supporting this new development. As Kenneth Flam points out, the British defense establishment was less willing than its American counterpart to support speculative and risky high-tech ventures.

The British government did not assume a central role in supporting university research. British industry was also more conservative and the business climate less favorable. The home market was too small; industry was unable to produce and market a rapidly changing technology, and it did not recognize the need to focus on manufacturability. Finally, there was less mobility of talented people between government, industry, and universities. In fact, there was more of a barrier to educating enough people in a new technological world than in the U.S.

Why bring up this old history? Because international competition in computing is greater, and the stakes higher, than ever before. And it is not clear that we are prepared to meet this competition or that our unique advantages of the 1950s exist today:

• Government policy toward high-risk, high-technology industries is less clear than in the 1950s. The old rationale for close cooperation—national defense—is no longer as compelling. Neither is defense the same leading user of high technology it once was.

• The advantage of our large domestic market is now rivaled by the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Pacific Rim countries.

• Both Japan and the EEC are mounting major programs to enhance their technology base, while our technology base is shrinking.

• Japan, as a matter of national policy, is enhancing cooperation between industry and universities—not always their own universities but sometimes ours.

• Industry is less able and willing to take the risk that IBM and Sperry did in the 1950s. The trend today is toward manipulating the financial structure for short-term profits.

• Finally, although the stakes and possible gains are tremendous, the costs of developing new generations of technology have risen beyond the ability of all but the largest and strongest companies, and sometimes of entire industries, to handle.

Corrective Action

What should we do so that we do not repeat the error of Great Britain in the 1950s? Both the changing global environment and increasing foreign competition should focus our attention on four actions to ensure that our economic performance can meet the competition.

First, we must make people—including well-educated scientists and engineers and a technically literate work force and populous—the focus of national policy. Nothing is more important than developing and using our human resources effectively.

Second, we must invest adequately in research and development.

Third, we must learn to cooperate in developing precompetitive technology in cases where costs may be prohibitive or skills lacking for individual companies or a even an industry.

Fourth, we must have access to new knowledge, both at home and abroad.

Let me discuss each of these four points.

Human Resources

People are the crucial resource. People generate the knowledge that allows us to create new technologies. We need more scientists and engineers, but we are not producing them.

In the last decade, employment of scientists and engineers grew three times as fast as total employment and twice as fast as total professional employment. Most of this growth was in the service sector, in which employment of scientists and engineers rose 5.7 per cent per year for the last decade. But even in the manufacturing sector, where there was no growth at all in total employment, science and engineering employment rose four per cent per year, attesting to the increasing technical complexity of manufacturing.

So there is no doubt about the demand for scientists and engineers. But there is real doubt that the supply will keep up. The student population is shrinking, so we must attract a larger proportion of students into science and engineering fields just to maintain the current number of graduates.

Unfortunately, the trend is the other way. Freshman interest in engineering and computer sciences decreased during the 1980s, but it increased for business, humanities, and the social sciences. Baccalaureates in mathematics and computer science peaked in 1986 and have since declined over 17 per cent. Among the physical and biological sciences, interest has grown only marginally.

In addition, minorities and women are increasingly important to our future work force. So we must make sure these groups participate to their fullest in science and engineering. But today only 14 per cent of female students, compared to 25 per cent of male students, are interested in the natural sciences and engineering in high school. By the time these students receive their bachelor's degrees, the number of women in these fields is less than half that of men. Only a tiny fraction of women go on to obtain Ph.Ds.

The problem is even worse among Blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics at every level—and these groups are a growing part of our population. Look around the room and you can see what I mean.

To deal with our human-resources problem, NSF has made human resources a priority, with special emphasis on programs to attract more women and minorities. At the precollege level, our budget has doubled since 1984, with many programs to improve math and science teachers and teaching. At the undergraduate level, NSF is developing new curricula in engineering, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, computer sciences, and foreign languages. And we are expanding our Research for Undergraduates Program.

My question to you is, how good are our education courses in computer science and engineering? How relevant are they to the requirements of future employers? Do they reflect the needs of other disciplines for new computational approaches?

R&D Investment

In the U.S., academic research is the source of most of the new ideas that drive innovation. Entire industries, including semiconductors, biotechnology, computers, and many materials areas, are based on research begun in universities.

The principal supporter of academic research is the federal government. Over the last 20 years, however, we have allowed academic research to languish. As a per cent of gross national product, federal support for academic research declined sharply from 1968 to 1974 and has not yet recovered to the 1968 level. Furthermore, most of the recent growth has occurred in the life sciences. Federal investment in the physical sciences and engineering, the fields that are most critical for competitive technologies, has stagnated. As a partial solution to this problem, NSF and the Administration have pressed for a doubling of the NSF budget by 1993. This would make a substantial difference and is essential to our technological and economic competitiveness.

We must also consider the balance between civilian and defense R&D. Today, in contrast to the past, the commercial sector is the precursor of leading-edge technologies, whereas defense research has become less critical to spawning commercial technology.

But this shift is not reflected in federal funding priorities. During the 1980s, the U.S. government sharply increased its investment in defense R&D as part of the arms buildup. Ten years ago, the federal R&D investment was evenly distributed between the defense and civilian sectors. Today the defense sector absorbs about 60 per cent. In 1987 it was as high as 67 or 68 per cent.

In addition to the federal R&D picture, we must consider the R&D investments made by industry, which has the prime responsibility for technology commercialization. Industry cannot succeed without strong R&D investments, and recently industry's investment in R&D has declined in real terms. It's a moot point whether the reason was the leveraged buyout and merger binge or shortsighted management action or something else. The important thing is to recognize the problem and begin to turn it around.

Industry must take advantage of university research, which in the U.S. is the wellspring of new concepts and ideas. NSF's science and technology centers, engineering research centers, and supercomputer centers are designed with this in mind, namely, multidisciplinary, relevant research with participation by the nonacademic sector.

But on a broader scale, the High Performance Computing Initiative developed under the direction of the Office of Science and Technology Policy requires not only the participation of all concerned agencies and industry but everybody's participation, especially that of the individuals and organizations here today.

Technology Strategy

Since World War II the federal government has accepted its role as basic research supporter. But it cannot be concerned with basic research, only. The shift to a world economy and the development of technology has meant that in many areas the scale of technology development has grown to the point where, at least in some cases, industry can no longer support it alone.

The United States, however, has been ambivalent about the government role in furthering the generic technology base, except in areas such as defense, in which government is the main customer. In contrast, our

foreign competitors often have the advantage of government support, which reduces the risk and assures a long-term financial commitment.

Nobody questions the government's role of ensuring that economic conditions are suitable for commercializing technologies. Fiscal and monetary policies, trade policies, R&D tax and antitrust laws, and interest rates are all tools through which the government creates the financial and regulatory environment within which industry can compete. But this is not enough. In addition, government and industry, together, must cooperate in the proper development of generic precompetitive technology in areas where it is clear that individual companies or private consortia are not able to do the job.

In many areas, the boundary lines between basic research and technology are blurring, if not overlapping completely. In these areas, generic technologies at their formative stages are the base for entire industries and industrial sectors. But the gestation period is long; it requires the interplay with basic science in a back-and-forth fashion. Developing generic technologies is expensive and risky, and the knowledge diffuses quickly to competitors.

If, at one time, the development of generic technology was a matter for the private sector, why does it now need the support of government?

First, it is not the case that the public sector was not involved in the past. For nearly 40 years, generic technology was developed by the U.S. in the context of military and space programs supported by the Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But recent developments have undermined this strategy for supporting generic technology:

• As I already said, the strategic technologies of the future will be developed increasingly in civilian contexts rather than in military or space programs. This is the reverse of the situation that existed in the sixties and seventies.

• American industry is facing competitors that are supported by their governments in establishing public/private partnerships for the development of generic technologies, both in the Pacific Rim and in the EEC.

• What's more, the cost of developing new technologies is rising. In many key industries, U.S. companies are losing their market share to foreign competitors—not only abroad but at home, as well. They are constrained in their ability to invest in new, risky technology efforts. They need additional resources.

But let's be clear . . . 

The "technology strategy" that I'm talking about is not an "industrial policy." Cooperation between government and industry does not mean a centrally controlled, government-coordinated plan for industrial development. It is absolutely fundamental that the basic choices concerning which products to develop and when must remain with private industry, backed by private money and the discipline of the market. But we can have this and also have the government assume a role that no longer can be satisfied by the private sector.

Cooperation is also needed between industry and universities in order to get new knowledge moving smoothly from the laboratory to the market. Before World War II, universities looked to industry for research support. During and after the war, however, it became easier for universities to get what they needed from the government, and the tradition slowly grew that industry and universities should stay at arm's length. But this was acceptable only when government was willing to carry the whole load, and that is no longer true. Today, neither side can afford to remain detached.

Better relations between industry and universities yield benefits to both sectors. Universities get needed financial support and a better vantage point for understanding industry's needs. Industry gets access to the best new ideas and the brightest people and a steady supply of the well-trained scientists and engineers it needs.

Cooperation also means private firms must learn to work together. In the U.S., at least in this century, antitrust laws have forced companies to consider their competitors as adversaries. This worked well to ensure competition in the domestic market, but it works less well today, when the real competition is not domestic, but foreign. Our laws and public attitudes must adjust to this new reality. We must understand both that cooperation at the precompetitive level is not a barrier to fierce competition in the marketplace and that domestic cooperation may be the prerequisite for international competitive success.

The evolution of the Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology Consortium is a good example of how government support and cooperation with industry leads to productive outcomes.

International Cooperation

Paradoxically, we must also strengthen international cooperation in research even as we learn to compete more aggressively. There is no confining knowledge within national or political boundaries, and no nation can afford to rely on its own resources for generating new

knowledge. Free access to new knowledge in other countries is necessary to remain competitive, but it depends on cooperative relationships.

In addition, the cost and complexity of modern research has escalated to the point where no nation can do it all—especially in "big science" areas and in fields like AIDS, global warming, earthquake prediction, and nuclear waste management. In these and other fields, sharing of people and facilities should be the automatic approach of research administrators.

Summary

My focus has been on the new global environment; the changes brought about by computers and computer science; international competition, its promise and its danger; and the role of government. But more important is a sustained commitment to cooperation and to a technical work force—these are the major determinants of success in developing a vibrant economy.

In the postwar years, we built up our basic science and engineering research structure and achieved a commanding lead in basic research and most strategic technologies. But now the focus must shift to holding on to what we accomplished and to building a new national technology structure that will allow us to achieve and maintain a commanding lead in the technologies that determine economic success in the world marketplace.

During World War II, the freedom of the world was at stake. During the Cold War, our free society was at stake. Today it is our standard of living and our leadership of the world as an economic power that are at stake.

Let me leave you with one thought: computers have become a symbol of our age. They are also a symbol and a barometer of the country's creativity and productivity in the effort to maintain our competitive position in the world arena. As other countries succeed in this area or overtake us, computers can become a symbol of our vulnerability.