The European Commission last week said it is doubling its investment in the push for exascale computing from [euro]630 million to [euro]1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion). The announcement comes even as European governments are imposing austerity measures to prevent defaults.
The race for exascale computing involves, the U.S., Europe, China and India at this stage. Intel is heavily investing in research and development towards exascale computing as well.
The Europeans announced the plan the same week the White House released its fiscal year 2013 budget, which envisions a third year of anemic funding to develop exascale technologies. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) asked for nearly $91 million in funding for the efforts in the current fiscal year; it received $73.4 million. That was up from $28.2 million spent on exascale the previous year.
That level of investment, according to Earl Joseph, an analyst for IDC, is "peanuts" for a program that may require billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, China is moving ahead with its own plans and has the financial resources and human talent to make progress in exascale computing. The Europeans may be particularly worried about China.
"Their biggest threat is that China is just going to bury them," said Joseph, referring to Europe. "With this level of investment, it gives them a chance to hold their own and maybe get a little bit a head of the game."
Major parts of the U.S. investment will go to fundamental research leading to new types of processors, memory, operating systems and compilers -- research breakthroughs that could also be applied commercially, said Joseph.
The Europeans, as do the Chinese, see opportunity in the push for exascale, which involves building systems 1,000 times more powerful than anything running today, an order of magnitude that has occurred about every 10 years in HPC development. An exascale system will be able to reach 1 quintillion (or 1 million trillion) floating point operations per second.
But exascale systems "pose numerous hard challenges," said the European Commission (EC) in a report that accompanied its funding announcements. The challenges include 100-fold reduction in energy consumption along with development of new programming models. As Europe sees it, solving these challenges creates opportunity for Europe, China and others looking to take on U.S. HPC dominance.
"These challenges are the same for all actors in the field and cannot be met by mere extrapolation, but require radical innovation in many computing technologies," wrote the EC in its report. "This offers opportunities to industrial and academic players in the EU to reposition themselves in the field."
As for China, "the Chinese are very practical in this regard," said Joseph. "They are very interested in how they use their machines to make their industries stronger."
In announcing Europe's investment, Neelie Kroes, the European Commission vice president responsible for the effort, said in a statement that "high performance computing is a crucial enabler for European industry and for more jobs in Europe. We've got to invest smartly in this field, because we cannot afford to leave it to our competitors."
"Friendly competition helps to drive things forward," said Dongarra.
In the video below, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Thomas Zacharia presents: Exascale Computing: Applications and Federal Efforts. Recorded at the Senate Science & Technology Caucus on March 17, 2011 in Washington, D.C. In the presentation, applications of exascale computing are discussed.
That's interesting.
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