The Magellan cloud computing testbed funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is dedicated to studying the advantages and disadvantages, in terms of cost and energy, of the cloud computing model as it applies to scientists working on government-funded initiatives. “What we’re exploring is the question of whether the DOE or other government agencies should be buying their own clusters … or whether those kinds of purchases should be done in a more consolidated way,” says the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centers’ Kathy Yelick. She says the testbed’s areas of concentration in addition to genomics research will include applied mathematics, high-energy physics, and climate data analysis. In terms of the usefulness of the cloud to scientific computation, Yelick contends that “there’s a part of the workload in scientific computing that’s well-suited to the cloud, but it’s not the [high-performance computing] end, it’s really the bulk aggregate serial workload that often comes up in scientific computing that is not really the traditional arena of high-performance computing.” She observes that one of the findings Magellan has uncovered in its experiments is the fact that performance differences are evident even when operating fairly modest-sized applications across different cloud environments.
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The Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) announced that the TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer, a green, cloud-based supercomputer system with a top speed of 2.4 petaflops, will begin operation this fall. TSUBAME 2.0 will be built by Hewlett-Packard and NEC using GPGPU computing and will feature a large solid-state drive. TSUBAME 2.0, dubbed Petakon, will be 12 times faster than Japan’s current fastest supercomputer and is expected to achieve a top ranking on the TOP500 list. It also is expected to score high on the DARPA HPC Challenge benchmark and the Green 500 list. TSUBAME 2.0 will feature Intel Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX processors with scalar operation, and will employ approximately 4,200 NVIDIA Fermi graphics processing units. Petakon also will have more than 1,400 computer nodes and use Voltaire’s QDR InfiniBand network. The operating system will be a combination of Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC, and will use virtual machine technology to provide cloud-hosting services.
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Improvements to network bandwidth will be for naught unless the Internet’s underlying protocols are updated, says Google’s Urs Holzle. He says that in the next few years the average network speed worldwide will likely expand three-fold from 1.8 Mbps to 5.4 Mbps. Holzle speculates that, according to internal tests at Google, Internet protocols as well as the browser are the reason a disparity exists between what Web page load times should be and what they actually are. Google is attempting to upgrade browser speeds with Google Chrome, which aims to achieve 100 millisecond load times–but this advance cannot come without changes to Net protocols. Google has successfully increased the speed of its search engine by 18 percent without changing the site itself by making “some very modest changes” to the TCP protocol, Holzle says. Meanwhile, Google’s in-development SPDY protocol is designed to reduce Web latency via improvements such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and HTTP header compression. Holzle says SPDY can slash packet counts by 40 percent and byte counts by 15 percent.
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European researchers working on the StratusLab project are developing software designed to improve distributed computing infrastructures in an effort to enable research and higher education organizations to pool computing resources. Trinity College Dublin (TCD) researchers are leading the development of a repository of virtual appliances that will make it easier to create grid systems. The virtual appliances repository is designed to facilitate the growth and availability of grid computing for researchers. “The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands,” says TCD’s David O’Callaghan. “Later it will allow organizations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.” The StratusLab project enhances the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem by simplifying management, adding flexibility, and increasing maintainability, quality, energy efficiency, and resiliency of computing sites.
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Empa researchers have synthesized complex organic nanowires and attached them together with electrically conducting links, a development that could lead to the production of electronic and optoelectronic components. The researchers say the process for synthesizing organic nanowires is unique in that the substrate temperature, molecule flow, and substrate treatment can be precisely controlled to enable the organic nanowires to develop a previously unattained, perfectly monocrystalline structure. The process includes a step in which the nanowires growing on the surface are ornamented with silver nanoparticles by sputter-coating. The nanoparticles are bombarded with energetic ions, knocking off silver atoms that enter the gas phase and are deposited onto the nanowires. Finally, more nanowires are grown, due to the silver particles’ electrical contact with the original wires, which forms the basis of an electrical circuit on the nanometer scale. “This opens up the possibility of soon being able to manufacture organic semiconductor materials,” says Empa’s Pierangelo Groening.
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Researchers at the universities of Surrey and Birmingham have developed a voting system that integrates optical scanning, data processing, and encryption with the process of manually writing on a paper ballot. The Surrey/Birmingham system retains the use of a paper ballot that looks nearly identical to those currently in use, but with two key differences. First, the order of the candidates’ names is randomized and is not the same on every ballot as in current elections. Second, a perforated line will run down the middle of the paper ballot, with the candidates’ names on the left and the voting boxes on the right. Each voter, after casting their ballot, will use this perforation to tear the paper ballot in half. They then will use a shredder to destroy the left-hand half containing the list of candidates and feed the right-hand half into an optical scanner, which will immediately feed all the information to a central database that keeps a count of all votes cast. “Our system will combine the best of both worlds–providing secure electronic vote-counting that cuts the cost and complexity of running elections but doesn’t require big changes to the actual voting process,” Surrey professor James Heather.
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U.S.-owned businesses and U.S. affiliates of foreign companies had worldwide R&D expenses of $330 billion in calendar year 2008 and worldwide sales of $11 trillion, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Working with the Census Bureau, NSF launched a pilot-scale study in 2008 to more accurately track R&D activity in an attempt to obtain a better gauge of the global competitiveness of the United States. The initial findings show the manufacturing sector accounted for about 71 percent of R&D activity. Moreover, 68 percent of the worldwide sales of companies with R&D activity came from their domestic business, and 85 percent of the sales at scientific R&D service companies came from their domestic operations. Small businesses with less than 500 employees invested more of their expenditures on R&D than larger companies, spending $64 billion on R&D and accounting for $1 trillion of the total $11 trillion in sales. About $234 billion of the total R&D expense was conducted in facilities in the United States. The report also shows that foreign companies with R&D operations in the United States are making up the difference in R&D activity that has been taken overseas by U.S.-based companies.
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The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) computer scientist Adolfy Hoisie will lead a group of scientists that will design supercomputers and their software applications simultaneously, so all the components of a supercomputer can be optimized and focused on one kind of problem. The PNNL team plans on solving the kinds of problems specific to various scientific fields, from studying biological systems to understanding the electrical power grid. The data-intensive problems the PNNL team wants to solve requires a different emphasis in computational resources, which is why they will design supercomputers and their applications simultaneously. “The science of systems and applications designed for optimal performance is a grand challenge for high performance computing research,” says PNNL researcher Moe Khaleel. The team also will examine how performance and power relate, and how they trade off against one another on extreme-scale systems and workloads.
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ETH Zurich scientists working on the FuturIcT project plan to use the world’s largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies, and whole societies. The ETH researchers, working under the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, are analyzing huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as communication networks or the Internet. The FutureIcT project aims to bring different kinds of research together to simulate the entire globe, including the diverse interactions of social systems and of the economy with the environment. The FutureIcT project also aims to analyze data on social, economic, and environmental processes by augmenting the results of field studies and laboratory experiments. “Such observatories would detect advance warning signs of many different kinds of emerging problems, including large-scale congestion, financial instabilities, the spreading of diseases, environmental change, resource shortages, and social conflicts,” says ETH’s Dirk Helbing.
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Oregon State University (OSU) researchers say they have made a fundamental advance in robotics that could lead to robots that use little energy to walk and run effectively. “What we’ve done is taken a step back to analyze the fundamental dynamics of the mechanical system, what behavior is really possible for a given robotic system,” says OSU professor Jonathan Hurst. Current walking and running robots tend to be extremely rigid while moving, but this approach uses a lot of energy, which greatly reduces their value and possible real-world applications. To improve upon robot locomotion, the OSU researchers studied the gait of ostriches, which respond well to unexpected disturbances while running. The researchers plan to build the robot equivalent of the ostrich by combining spring-mass models with force-control actuators. “There are machines that can walk with no active controls at all, using barely any energy, but they fall if they run into the smallest bump,” Hurst says. “We need to use as much of that passive ability as possible and only use motors or active controls if it’s really necessary, so we can save energy in the process.”
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