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IBM'S DAVID TUREK TESTIFIES BEFORE CONGRESS

Below is testimony from IBM's Vice President of Deep Computing, David Turek, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources from June 22, 2004. Turek spoke about the national importance of supercomputing, as Congress explores HR 4218, the High-Performance Computing Revitalization Act of 2004 and S. 2176.

Good morning, Chairman Alexander and members of the Energy Subcommittee. My name is David Turek and I am Vice President, Deep Computing for the IBM Corporation. I have responsibility for providing the products, solutions and services offerings designed to meet the high performance computing needs of customers in market segments as diverse as financial services, business intelligence, scientific research, medical imaging, petroleum exploration, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and industrial design and digital media.

Thank you for inviting me here today. I commend you and the committee for helping to ensure the continued leadership of the US in high performance computing.

First, I'd like to thank Senators Alexander and Bingaman for sponsoring S. 2176. IBM is fully supportive of the basic tenets of this bill: 1) advancing high end computing in the US; 2) advancing hardware and software development through an ultrascale computing program for scientific research and development; and 3) supporting the DoE's role in advancing high performance computing, especially in the area of non-classified scientific discovery.

I believe that it is critical to extend US leadership in high performance computing -it is an increasingly important tool facilitating scientific discovery, business competitiveness, and homeland security in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, the scientific and engineering research communities are increasingly accepting the two main supercomputing activities - simulation and data analysis - as two new pillars for discovery, expanding beyond the traditional activities of theory and experimentation. Through the pursuit of a computing technology to serve diverse agency missions, the federal government has provided a stimulus for innovative computing design that has often, over time, diffused more broadly into the commercial marketplace. The process of innovation and diffusion has been active for decades and the results have been cumulative and profound. We can all remember a time when the concept of supercomputing was restricted to a narrow community of users, extraordinarily skilled and extraordinarily financed to support the operation and acquisition of expensive and exotic technology. Over time, as the inexorable decline in cost of computing progressed, the financial impediments to supercomputing also declined and the community of potential users expanded. Financial accessibility enabled exploration and experimentation with supercomputing in applications that were unanticipated and novel in many wonderful ways. People, enterprises, and institutions which had previously been unable to afford access to this type of technology became able to do so. Creativity blossomed and we began to see the deployment of supercomputers in a broad array of industries outside the domain of the classic large scale research institutions. Commercial deployment of supercomputing became a vehicle for competitive advantage, generating significant commercial demand for supercomputing and creating the economic circumstances that drive the considerable level of research and development prevalent among the leading supercomputing companies we observe today.

Proliferation of supercomputing, enabled in part by affordability, has created cadres of sophisticated users across the entire portfolio of industries served. Many of these people have followed their entrepreneurial instincts and have started or joined new companies, some of modest size, to which they have brought their knowledge of the value and application of supercomputing. The consequence is that today we are beginning to witness the emergence of small, highly creative and skilled companies that are choosing to compete by developing applications based on supercomputing technology. While it may be true that many of these companies still find conventional access to supercomputing limited by concerns of affordability or limited in-house operational expertise there are new ideas being deployed in the marketplace that are beginning to ameliorate these difficulties.

IBM has implemented a number of on demand supercomputing facilities accessible to customers for short periods of time via the internet. We call this Deep Computing Capacity on Demand. The aggregate compute power in one facility in New York is roughly equivalent to the 4th most powerful supercomputer in the world in terms of the recently published TOP500 list. Yet customers with less than 100 employees in total can access this system for short periods of time to compete with large companies in areas like therapeutic drug design, animation, and petroleum exploration. The ability to proliferate supercomputing into small and medium size companies through mechanisms like IBM's on demand centers enhances the competitiveness of entire industries in ways never before imagined.

As government outlines its strategy for high performance computing, I am sure you realize the enormous impact that you can have on the entire nation in dealing with the ongoing changes and challenges that we face in leveraging economic development and spurring free markets, growth and innovation. The U.S. is experiencing increasing competition from nations worldwide. Our innovativeness can establish our continued competitive standing in the world and assure the advancements necessary to maintain our standard of living for generations to come. High performance computing is an essential element in our effort to compete worldwide. While IBM and many other companies have strong research programs, the federal government is the key to making certain that basic research is done today to ensure tomorrow's inventions.

The High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004

The High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004 demonstrates that the federal government would like to extend its commitment to support high-end computing research and development.

This is critically important because in addition to meeting its own agency mission requirements, federal funding has traditionally seeded high risk research and enabled the critical university research necessary to advance high performance computing and other important areas in information technology. This investment in research has complemented the financial risks taken by the firms in our industry. It has enabled the development of technologies at a faster pace than could be accomplished by the risk capital of private industry by itself. As a result, innovation has accelerated and new technologies which provide competitive advantage on a national scale across private industry and research institutions are introduced much more quickly than would be possible without federal funding.

The partnership between the federal government and computer manufacturers has been a key driver in advancing high performance computing and making it more ubiquitous. I would, therefore, like to address this in three ways: First, why high performance computing is important; second, the importance of the partnerships that exist between IBM and the DoE; and third, the five year outlook for high performance computing.

Importance of High Performance Computing

High performance computing (or supercomputing) provides the means to solve problems that appeared to be unsolvable by conventional means, to solve hard problems with extraordinary speed, and to plumb the depths of complex problems to provide insights never before realized. IBM supercomputers, for instance, have been platforms for analysis in areas such as modeling transportation routes through congested urban areas for the purpose of efficient delivery of goods and services, identity theft prevention, pharmaceutical development, weather forecasting, disease research, petroleum discovery, digital animation, financial services, and basic research on materials and scientific phenomena.

The consequence of such supercomputing applications are manifold: our consumer products are better designed, cheaper and more abundant, our medical diagnostics and therapeutics are superior, our ability to analyze the risk of financial instruments takes place at a pace never before imagined, our understanding of the origins of the universe is developed to an extraordinary extent, and even our movies employ fantastic synthetic images and scenes that entertain and amaze in ways unimaginable even a decade ago. To a substantial degree, these types of benefits have accrued as a result of the relentless decline in computing costs and have enabled a broader community of users to get access to high performance computing capabilities. But we must take into account that not all companies or institutes have equivalent financial or business circumstances: if access to supercomputing is an important ingredient to maintaining or amplifying scientific or business competitiveness, we must contemplate a variety of mechanisms by which access to supercomputing can be made available.

As previously mentioned, we have a service called IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand, which enables customers to access IBM supercomputing power over the Internet without the costs and management responsibilities of owning their own supercomputer. Customers can:

• easily tap into massive amounts of supercomputing power that could be otherwise unaffordable
• rapidly deploy supercomputing capacity in response to urgent business opportunities
• pay for supercomputing capacity on a variable cost basis, avoiding large up-front capital outlays and long term fixed IT cost commitments
• lower overall supercomputing ownership and operating costs
• take advantage of a scalable, highly secure and highly resilient on demand operating environment

This approach to providing access to supercomputing resonates with many customers because they pay for what they use, they do not have to worry about technological obsolescence nor housing a supercomputer. This is an important example of how supercomputing, as a means to competitiveness, can be more broadly propagated throughout the marketplace.

But access is not solely a function of affordability; skill within an enterprise or institution also plays a critical role in terms of the ability to exploit the power of supercomputing. To that end, IBM has begun the Productive, Easy to use, Reliable Computing Systems (PERCS) project, one of three projects under Phase II of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. HPCS is a long-term investigation of a range of issues that define the overall value that a user obtains from a computing system, including performance efficiency, scalability, robustness, and ease of use. The HPCS program emphasizes groundbreaking, high-risk/high-reward research with a close eye on commercialization prospects. IBM is partnering with multiple universities and Los Alamos National Laboratory in this project.

I would also like to address the general state of the US supercomputing industry and its ability to deliver on this promise of enhanced scientific and commercial competitiveness. Earlier this week, the semi-annual report from the TOP500 organization was published. This publication lists the top 500 supercomputers in the world, ordered by sustained performance on a standard benchmark. Out of 500 systems, 456 come from US companies with IBM supplying 224 of the total. US computer companies account for 89% of the total compute power ascribed to these 500 systems. The US economy consumes more than 55% of the aggregate compute power generated by the computers on this list which is five times greater than the compute power consumed by any other country in the world. Our industry is alive, well, and serving the needs of the US economy to an unmatched degree. If you inspect this list, you will note that many of the industries I have previously mentioned are well represented.

Importance of Partnerships

An important means by which US supercomputing companies maintain technological leadership is through partnerships with some of our most sophisticated customers. For purposes of this hearing, I will primarily discuss our partnerships with the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) which have been notable in terms of the extent to which DoE computational requirements have impacted our system designs.

DoE has contracted with IBM to build what will soon be the two fastest supercomputers in the world, ASC (Advanced Simulation and Computing) Purple, based on our high end POWER systems, and Blue Gene/L, based on our low power embedded POWER processors, together they have a combined peak speed of 460 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The ASC POWER system will be used for simulation and modeling in the U.S. nuclear weapons mission and Blue Gene/L will be focused on enhancing ASC scientific simulations and providing ASC researchers with a cutting-edge tool for computational science. The ASC program has been extremely beneficial in its mandate to manage the nuclear stockpile as well as in advancing high performance computing.

We will also work with the ASCR (Advanced Scientific Computing Research) program to build a 5-teraflop Blue Gene/L machine at the Argonne National Laboratory. That marks the third announced installation of Blue Gene/L, after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory system and ASTRON, a radio telescope project in Netherlands. Two Blue Gene/L prototypes have been ranked among the most powerful supercomputers in the world today, ranking number four and eight in the Top500 list announced yesterday in Heidelberg. The Blue Gene/L at Argonne National Laboratory will be part of the DoE Office of Science Leadership Class RFP.

The projects that we are executing in partnership with the DoE are shaping our approach to system design in terms of system scaling, tools, system availability and usability to a degree never before attempted. At the end of 1999 the most powerful supercomputer in the world was about 3 teraflops; by the middle of 2005 the Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be 100 times more powerful and it will incorporate a host of novel technologies and design ideas motivated entirely by the desire to build a system of this class of computational capability at an affordable price. The rate and pace of improvement is truly unprecedented and much of the credit is due to the demanding requirements of, and strong partnerships with customers like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Five Year Outlook

As we look out in time over the next five years we expect certain trends to continue: prices will continue to decline and a broader community of potential customers will obtain access to supercomputing as a result; evolved models of delivery based on on-demand principles will become more prevalent; systems will become progressively more physically compact, easy to use and manage; and new applications will emerge in importance that will stretch our thoughts on system architectures in currently unanticipated ways. It is imperative that our industry, sustain and amplify the utility of supercomputing as we make technological advances through this period. We must not create obstacles that will block the use of new technologies. While we stretch towards the future we must be mindful of the past, so that the investments our customers have made in training and application development are not wasted. For example, when we set out to design the Blue Gene system in late 1999, one of its goals was that applications written over the intervening years be portable to this system at the time of its debut. Thus the radical improvements in performance and price performance embodied in the Blue Gene system are perfectly accessible to applications written over the last fifteen years on a wide variety of cluster and massively parallel processor (MPP) systems without, for the most part, any modification. The introduction of new technologies must always make accommodations to the burdens levied on users so that the cost of transitioning to the technology does not dominate the benefits of using the technology.

Within IBM we are pursuing multiple design paths built around a handful of guiding principles: First, although the requirements of the industry are extraordinarily diverse, the fundamental approach to supercomputing will remain wedded to principles of parallel computing. Second, from an implementation perspective this need will be accommodated with "scale-out" or cluster models of computing as well as "scale-up" or symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) models of computing. As is the case today, many customers will deploy both models simultaneously to accommodate the diversity of computational needs they encounter. Third, the centerpiece of our strategy is our POWER architecture. It enables models of parallelism at a variety of price and capability points to better accommodate the broad needs of our customers. Fourth, we will complement our product portfolio with offerings based on industry standard commodity technologies. Fifth, we will continue to embrace open standards. And sixth, all of our design decisions will be driven by customers and market based opportunities.

Conclusion

High performance computing requires continued advancement to handle the increasing complexity, scale and scope of challenges arising in industry, government, and the scientific community and solve consistently larger and more complex problems more quickly and at lower costs. The application of high performance computing has allowed us to better understand the complexities of scientific discovery and business--responding to the challenges of national security; environmental impacts; designing large aircraft; simulating critical medical procedures; designing new pharmaceutical drugs; and more. In addition, the range of uses of these tools is being extended as they become progressively more affordable and accessible. It is therefore critical for the US government to develop and fund a creative and productive high performance computing environment and strategy to help enable problem-solving tools for the significant challenges that lie ahead.

David Turek IBM Vice President Deep Computing

David Turek was appointed his current position in April of 2003. He is responsible for IBM's Deep Computing business which consists of products, solutions and service offerings targeted to insightfully meet the high performance computing needs of customers ranging from the extreme scientific to commercial customers in market segments as diverse as financial services, business intelligence, scientific research, medical imaging, petroleum exploration, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and industrial design and digital media.

Most recently he was responsible for IBM's Linux Cluster business and launched IBM's efforts around supercomputing on demand as well as high performance computing Grids. In 2000 he was Vice President of IBM's Supercomputing Strategy and Products and in 1999 he was responsible for Technical Strategy and business opportunity for IBM servers. From 1992 to 1998, he was the Director of Systems Development for the IBM RS/6000 SP, IBM's Massively Parallel Processing system (sometimes known as Deep Blue, world chess champion), where he was responsible for the design and development of four generations of node (processor) technology, five operating system releases, and two generations of switch technology. He joined IBM in 1974 as a Systems Engineer and has held a variety of other technical and management positions within the IBM Corporation.

Turek has an M.S. in Mathematics from Trinity College (1976) and a B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from University of Rochester (1972). He was also was a student in the Ph.D. Program in Operations Research at the University of Pennsylvania (1980).