>>Dr. McGovern: I’m Dr. McGovern, and I’m here today with Dr. Henry Neeman who is the
director of the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research. So Henry, can you
tell us more about what OSCER does?
>>Dr. Neeman: Sure! So we provide supercomputing education, expertise and resources not only
to the OU community, but to researchers across the state and to the collaborators all around the
world. So on the education side, we teach people both about supercomputing and how to
use supercomputing. In terms of expertise, we work with researchers to get them productive
quickly doing research on the supercomputer. And then of course resources, that’s the
machines themselves.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay, so can you tell our audience what a supercomputer is? What makes
a supercomputer “super”?
>>Dr. Neeman: Sure. In order to be a supercomputer, all you have to be is really, really big and
really, really fast. In fact, you have to be one of the biggest, fastest computers in
the world right this minute. And the reason I say right this minute is because it’s
always changing. Computers are always getting bigger and faster. So if something is a supercomputer
today, it certainly won’t be a supercomputer 10 years from now. In fact, then it’ll be
a laptop. Five years from now, maybe three years from now – yeah, it’s probably still
a supercomputer.
>>Dr. McGovern: So how big is your supercomputer? Can you tell us about it?
>>Dr. Neeman: The one we currently have, which is actually getting towards the end of its
life, can do a little over 100 trillion calculations per second. By comparison, the one that we had
10 years ago could do one trillion calculations per second. So we’ve increased by a factor
of 100 over the course of 10 years.
>>Dr. McGovern: And how many cores? They’ve learned about what a core and a process—a CPU.
>>Dr. Neeman: Sure.
>>Dr. McGovern: How many do you have?
>>Dr. Neeman: So we’ve got just under 7,000 CPU cores. And these are standard Intel CPUs,
just like the kind of CPUs that you have in a laptop or desktop PC.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay 7,000. And can they use all 7,000 at once?
>>Dr. Neeman: I don’t think we usually see that. We’ve seen people use the majority
of them. It gets a little bit tricky because there’s lots of other people wanting to
use them at the same time, and so if you get into line and you’re waiting your turn,
you might end up waiting a long time. Usually when someone wants to run a job that big we
recommend that they work with us, so that for example we can get their job to start
right after the end of a maintenance period when nobody else is on the machine.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay. So for another aspect of a supercomputer – you said it has 7,000
cores. How much memory does it have?
>>Dr. Neeman: It's about 15 and a half terabytes of RAM, and then by comparison about 250 terabytes
of disc.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay. And one other thing they learned about was the GPUs.
>>Dr. Neeman: Mhmmm.
>>Dr. McGovern: Do you have a GPU-based supercomputer?
>>Dr. Neeman: We have both GPUs and non-GPU accelerators in the supercomputer. We have
about 25 GPU cards in the supercomputer, and then we have a like number of Intel Xeon Phi
accelerator cards, which are essentially made up of souped-up Intel Atom cores.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay. They’re not GPUs?
>>Dr. Neeman: They’re not technically GPUs; you can’t use them to do rendering, but
they do number crunching in a way that’s somewhat similar to how GPUs do number crunching.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay, and they can be used to build their own special segment of the
program? So they’re really fast – you can run on just those?
>>Dr. Neeman: You can. And in fact, with the Intel accelerators you can actually
treat the Intel accelerators as if they’re servers. With the GPUs you can’t really
do that. You have a server that they’re contained in – that’s true with the Intel
accelerators as well. But with the GPUs you have to use them as what’s sometimes referred
to as offload engines, where you take part of your computing and you stick it in the
card, and then the card does that computing really fast.
>>Dr. McGovern: So they’ve learned how to program in a language called Snap!, which
is a graphical language. And I know –
>>Dr. Neeman: Okay.
>>Dr. McGovern: – you teach the students, and they could be interested in your course
next. You teach the students how to program in C.
>>Dr. Neeman: That’s correct.
>>Dr. McGovern: What would they use if they were going to use the supercomputer?
>>Dr. Neeman: So the most popular languages in supercomputing today are C, C++, and Fortran,
and sort of not in that order. Fortran is probably still the most popular. Fortran is
actually – if not the oldest then one of the oldest higher-level languages in history;
it was developed in the late 1950s. But it’s still very popular, largely because A) there’s
a huge base of what we call legacy code out there, which is old Fortran programs that
are still useful and still being used in production today, and partly because there are old Fortran
programmers who are still useful –
>>Dr. McGovern: [laughs]
>>Dr. Neeman: – and they know Fortran very well. And so they’ve continued to maintain
the Fortran code. And one other reason: if you’ve got a code that's been around for a long time, you’ve
done lots of good debugging on it. If you then translate it to a new language, you’re
introducing exciting new bugs into it. That’s usually not something they can afford to do.
>>Dr. McGovern: And they’ve learned about debugging this semester. So they’ve learned
about writing code and commenting it, and trying to find the right code and make sure
it works right.
>>Dr. Neeman: Yes, and remember, why waste hours on design when you could spend weeks
debugging?
>>Dr. McGovern: Excellent advice. [laughs] So you said that you used this for teaching
people how to use the supercomputers. What researchers across campus, what disciplines
do they come from? Who uses OSCER? Can you tell us?
>>Dr. Neeman: It’s literally everything from aerospace to zoology. The most popular,
number one – you know, OU is a big meteorology school. Number one is weather forecasting.
We do an enormous amount of both real-time weather forecasts and research runs for publications,
and that adds up to close to half the total usage of the supercomputer. Number two is
molecular dynamics. So if you want to understand the shapes that molecules make, you’ve got
to calculate the forces among all of those molecules in order to see how they’ll bend.
Because the shape of a molecule then affects the structures it can create, and that effects
what you do with it. So if we’ve got DNA that says build this particular thing, you
could end up with a really smart brain or you could end up with Alzheimer’s depending
on whether that’s right or wrong, so to speak. So molecular dynamics is number two;
that’s probably between a quarter and a third of our usage. Number three is high-energy
physics. So this is banging tiny particles together at unbelievably high speed. These
folks are producing petabytes of data every year that they – in order to chew through
that data, they’ve got to farm it out to zillions of universities not just in the U.S.,
all over the world. I think there’s something like over 100 countries involved
in these kinds of projects.
>>Dr. McGovern: Wow.
>>Dr. Neeman: And we are part of what’s called a tier two center. So tier one is one
of the big national labs. We’re a tier two center. We’re drawing in a lot of this data
from the big accelerators. We’re chewing through it looking for things like the Higgs
boson, which was discovered about a year ago –
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: – through that kind of experiment. We’re also doing simulations to show whether
what we think are the laws of physics that govern banging tiny particles together actually
are the laws of physics that govern banging tiny particles together.
>>Dr. McGovern: So that molecular stuff that you were talking about, is that related to
the protein folding? I know there’s like a program you can download called “Fold at home”?
>>Dr. Neeman: Right. So molecular dynamics is what underlies protein folding; that’s
how you do the protein folding. So if I’m an atom and you’re an atom, there’s a
force between us, and you can trivially calculate that force. Now if there’s another atom
sitting over here, we can calculate the force from me to that atom from me to you. If there’s
another one over there, from me to there, me to there, me to there, and so on. So the
number of forces we have to calculate is proportional to the square of the number of atoms. That
creates an enormous amount of calculation. Folding@home is an example of where they discovered
there was an enormous amount of idle computers around the world just sitting around in screensaver mode. So
why not take advantage of that? When they’re in screensaver mode, have them do number crunching
for folding proteins. And they’re not literally, like, folding the proteins; they’re calculating
the shapes that would naturally arise based on those forces. And I mentioned about Alzheimer’s
– what, what gives rise to Alzheimer’s is the proteins in your brain – they’re
slightly incorrect, but they can fold very wrong as a result of being slightly incorrect.
They're the wrong shapes, so they don’t turn into the correct structures, and that
can make big problems for you. This is actually a fairly acute issue for me, because my grandmother
and my aunt both died of Alzheimer’s when they were about 40 years older than I am now.
So you’ve got 40 years to solve this problem, folks.
>>Dr. McGovern: [laughs]
>>Dr. Neeman: Get on it, please.
>>Dr. McGovern: I’ve seen some interesting things in the news lately about Alzheimer’s
research.
>>Dr. Neeman: Mhmm.
>>Dr. McGovern: So they’re making progress.
>>Dr. Neeman: They are, and it’s partially thanks to projects like Folding@home and other
molecular dynamics projects.
>>Dr. McGovern: So if they were interested in the supercomputers – we’ll talk about
OSCER’s resources – but just on the Folding@home note, is that sort of making a virtual supercomputer
for the students that they can join?
>>Dr. Neeman: Absolutely. And in fact, projects like Folding@home constitute arguably the
biggest virtual supercomputer in the world.
>>Dr. McGovern: That’s pretty cool.
>>Dr. Neeman: Far bigger than any actual supercomputer has been able to build to, largely because
building a huge supercomputer is incredibly expensive.
>>Dr. McGovern: I was involved in SETI at home for a long time.
>>Dr. Neeman: Mhmm, same kind of idea.
>>Dr. McGovern: Yeah, looking for extraterrestrial signals.
>>Dr. Neeman: And it’s a brilliant solution to a very tough problem, because they’re
looking for radio signals from bug-eyed monsters out in space, and leaving aside the fact that
all of the move I’ve seen – when the bug-eyed monsters find us then they come to eat us,
but leaving that aside –
>>Dr. McGovern: [laughs] We’re looking for the friendly ones.
>>Dr. Neeman: Yeah, so hopefully these are the nice, friendly bug-eyed monsters out in
space. But it’s really hard to convince a funding agency or Congress to put a lot
of money into supercomputers to look for bug-eyed monsters out in space. And so SETI@home was
this brilliant idea that gave rise to other projects like Folding@home. Well, all these
idle desktops – let’s see if we can get people to volunteer –
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: – some of their idle machines to help us look for the green, bug-eyed monsters
out in space.
>>Dr. McGovern: I hope that we find the friendly aliens when we do find them.
>>Dr. Neeman: I certainly do, too. That would be way better.
>>Dr. McGovern: Yeah. [laughs] They don’t have to be bug-eyed.
>>Dr. Neeman: No. Well you know, they seem to just turn out that way in the movies.
>>Dr. McGovern: So you mentioned that your current supercomputer is getting to the end
of its lifetime. What does that mean? What are your plans for the next one?
>>Dr. Neeman: So we’ve already done a request for proposals from a variety of vendors to
buy the next supercomputer. And the bids have come in, we’ve done an evaluation on them,
and we’ve submitted an agenda item to the OU Board of Regents. So we’re waiting for
the OU Board of Regents to have their next meeting, which will be in mid March. At that
meeting they’ll announce their decision. Assuming all of that goes well, then we’ll
move into a final design phase where we’re working with the chosen vendor to work out
the particulars. And this year for the first time, we’ll be doing that in collaboration
with faculty, staff, and students across the University. We’ll be asking all of you
to participate in that process to help us make better decisions in terms of which kinds
of components, what quantities of components (within the budget that we’ve got available).
>>Dr. McGovern: So the last time you went up by 100 fold?
>>Dr. Neeman: Well over 10 years we did; that was over four different systems.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay, so what is the current cycle? And what are you expecting to go up
by?
>>Dr. Neeman: It’s always hard to say for sure, because it depends on market conditions
and the particulars of the decisions we make. We would expect a factor of two to three improvement
over the current system.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay. So I know your current naming scheme is that you name the supercomputers
Boomer and Sooner. Which one are you on now and what is the plan for the new one?
>>Dr. Neeman: So as it turns out, we actually have three names. So the current system is
Boomer; its predecessor was Sooner. Some years ago we got a grant from the National Science
Foundation to buy a somewhat different flavor of supercomputer, on a smaller scale. And
we named that one Schooner –
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay.
>>Dr. Neeman: – after, of course, the Sooner Schooner.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: So we haven’t used that name for a while, so we’re bringing it back into
the rotation. So the next system will be known as Schooner.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay. So how does OSCER help researchers across campus? You said that part
of your mission is education. Can you tell us more?
>>Dr. Neeman: Sure. On the education side, we do a workshop series, we’re actually
doing it right now – did it yesterday – called “Supercomputing in Plain English.” Now this
is 11 sessions where we cover not deep technical content, but the concepts that underlie supercomputing
and related technologies. So this past week we did shared memory parallelism where you
have a bunch of cores in your CPU, and they’re all working together to solve some larger
problem so that they can speed up the time to solution. Next week we’re going to do
distributed parallelism, where you have a bunch of computers and they cooperate together
over a network to solve a problem even bigger than you could do inside an individual computer.
But this workshop series – we’ve been doing it literally since the day we opened
our doors. We are the OU Supercomputing Center for Education Research. We didn’t just put
the “E” first because it made a better acronym; we also put it first because we really
do believe that if you aren’t helped to learn how to use these technologies effectively,
then giving you access to the technologies is a waste of your time. So what we do – we
focus very strongly, and the very first thing we did the very first day we opened our doors
was to teach the very first of these workshops. And we’ve been doing it about every other
year ever since then. Starting in 2007, we started putting it out over video conferencing.
And so we’ve served over 2,000 people in every U.S. state – except Vermont and Rhode
Island for some reason – and three U.S. territories plus 17 other countries on every continent
except Australia and Antarctica.
>>Dr. McGovern: That impressive! You should get on Janux, and then you can serve even
more people.
>>Dr. Neeman: That is true. And in fact, we use this information when we write grant proposals
to federal research funding agencies and say, “Look at the amazing stuff we’ve been
doing teaching the world about supercomputing,” and that helps us to get funding.
>>Dr. McGovern: So if the students get really interested in using a supercomputer, how do
they start? Do they come find you? What do they do?
>>Dr. Neeman: So they come find me, and they come find someone like you. So in order for
a student to get an account, all they need is a faculty or staff sponsor, and then they
just send an email – and we have a webpage that lists the information that we need. They
send an email with that information, we have to verify it a little bit, and then we'll put together
an account for them. We can usually turn that around in about a business day or less.
>>Dr. McGovern: Okay, and I know from past experience that you really help them get started too.
>>Dr. Neeman: Yes.
>>Dr. McGovern: Because you helped our research group get going.
>>Dr. Neeman: So we’re very hands on. If you’re starting in supercomputing and you
don’t yet know A) how to do supercomputing at all, and/or B) how to use our supercomputer,
then either you can come visit one of us for an hour or two or we’ll come visit you.
And our general rule of thumb is we don’t leave that meeting until you’re productive.
>>Dr. McGovern: Yeah.
>>Dr. Neeman: Until you can do supercomputing without us being there.
>>Dr. McGovern: And something I talked about in some of my other interviews was research opportunities
for undergraduates. Do you hire undergraduates in your group at all?
>>Dr. Neeman: We do a little bit. We don’t have a huge budget for that. We currently
have…I think it’s two student positions? Maybe a third now – not all of them are
filled right now. But we actually do hire students, and we have them help us on a lot
of the core tasks that we need to get done, but that a person could learn pretty quickly
how to do them effectively and correctly. And then once a student starts down that road,
over time they learn more and more, so that they can come out of whatever their degree
program is ready to take on a position similar to the work that they’ve been doing. And
the demand for those kinds of positions is huge. I was at a big supercomputing conference
back in November and there was a booth from one of the oil companies. And I went up to them and I said, “So are you in the supercomputing
business?” He said, “No, I’m here to recruit.” And I said, “Oh. Well, so how’s
that going?” And he said, “Well it’s going pretty well, but it’s hard to find people.”
And I said, “Well if you could find all the people you wanted, how many more of them
would you hire?” He said, “We would hire three times as many –
>>Dr. McGovern: Wow.
>>Dr. Neeman: – if we could only find them.”
>>Dr. McGovern: Wow.
>>Dr. Neeman: Yeah. So the demand for people who understand supercomputing is enormous.
The other great thing about learning supercomputing is it’s one of the only ways we know to
actually be able to predict the future. And I don’t mean that in the sense of running
simulations, I mean in the sense of the future of technology.
>>Dr. McGovern: Ah, okay.
>>Dr. Neeman: So you’ve heard of Moore’s law: computing speed doubles every couple
of years. Well I mentioned earlier, one of the wonderful things about supercomputers
is if it’s a supercomputer today, in 10 to 15 years it’s going to be a laptop.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: And in 25 to 30, it’s going to be a cell phone. So what you know once
you’ve used supercomputing is you know 10 to 15 years ahead of what the world of technology
is going to look like. Because what we’ve seen again and again perfectly consistently is whatever happens in
supercomputing today will be on your desk or lap in 10 to 15 years; that always happens. So
it’s one of the few ways we have – you know, Yogi Berra is claimed to have said
and so are others have claimed to have said, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.”
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: But this is one prediction we can teach you to make. Because all you've got
to do is play with today’s supercomputers, and you can pretty much guarantee what a laptop is
going to look like in 10 to 15 years.
>>Dr. McGovern: Well one of the things that they’ve been talking about – we’ve taught them
about transistors.
>>Dr. Neeman: Mhmm.
>>Dr. McGovern: And about one of the technologies – carbon nanotube transistors?
>>Dr. McGovern: And this looks like they might fundamentally revolutionize everything.
>>Dr. Neeman: Yeah, there’s a lot of new exciting technologies that the particular
technologies we’re using today in hardware are maybe coming toward the end of their life
in the sense that we can’t keep shrinking them forever.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: We can shrink them down to a certain level, but we’re not too many years
away from that being as far as we can shrink them. And that means we’re coming to the
end of Moore’s law for that technology, but we’re not coming to the end of Moore’s
law because as you say, there are new technologies coming. So carbon nanotubes is one of them.
Another is DNA computing, another is quantum computing. These are all areas that are...well, rich
areas of research, which means we don’t know what we’re doing yet.
>>Dr. McGovern: [laughs] Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: Where within probably 10 to 15 years, one or more of these technologies will be
in common use around the world. There’s already one company that sells what they describe
as a quantum computer, and there are explorations – and you see in, in the newspapers articles
about using DNA to store data. In some ways it’s superior to the technologies we have
today, including, especially, the amount of capacity you can squeeze onto it. And carbon nanotubes have
a lot of advantages with respect to physical properties that make it possible to get a
lot more out of them and to keep that shrink rate going much farther than the current technologies
could do.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right. I think the current nano…I think they’re 14 nanometers for a transistor –
>>Dr. Neeman: Right.
>>Dr. McGovern: – right now?
>>Dr. Neeman: Right. We’ve seen officially announced down to at least eight nanometers,
maybe – I can’t remember if I’ve seen six or five actually announced. I know I’ve
heard discussions about that. You can look on Wikipedia and they’ll talk about it.
But yes, they’ll keep going for a while, but there isn’t that much farther they can
go.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right. So part of the reason we’re doing this series of interviews is
to have the students learn about the impact of computing and the impact of the Internet
on science and engineering research. So can we ask those two questions? We’ll start
with the impact of computing.
>>Dr. Neeman: Sure.
>>Dr. McGovern: How have your experience shown you – how has computers and supercomputers
changed the world?
>>Dr. Neeman: In the specific context of science and engineering research, computers have changed
everything. The way that we do science and engineering research today is fundamentally
different from how it was done before there were computers. And a lot of that is we now
have the ability, in addition to analyzing mountains of data – which is incredibly
important – we also have the ability to simulate, to, to pretend a particular physical
phenomenon in order to discover not just the effects of that phenomenon, which is usually
what you can get from laboratory experiments and observation, but to actually examine the
mechanisms. The, the great thing about computational science and engineering is that you can tackle
problems that are either too big or too small or too fast or too slow or too dangerous or
too expensive to do in real life. So if you think about too big, my advisor for my PhD
was actually an astronomer – a cosmologist. So he studies the entire universe over its
entire lifetime, from an infinitesimally after the Big Bang until today, and in fact, on
into the future. The only way they can figure out what’s going on in the universe is to
guess what the rules are and then simulate it and see whether the result looks like what we
see when we look through a telescope. So what they’ve come up with now is they have a
very clear sense of how old the universe is relative to the Big Bang. They have a pretty
good sense of what the mix of ingredients in the universe are. Much of what they did
in the ‘80s and ‘90s was like trying to bake a cake where you knew the list of ingredients,
but had no idea the proportions. So you know, one day you would bake a cake that was,
you know, 10 pounds of butter and a pinch of flour and an ocean of sugar. And you know,
as much as everybody wants to have that heart attack, you’re not going to get a very good
cake. Now they’ve done enough of these that they have a pretty good sense of the propor—how
much flour, how much sugar, how many eggs. Only it’s dark matter and dark energy and
visible matter and visible energy that are the components. Helium and hydrogen are the, the
primary constituents of the whole universe.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: They wouldn’t have known any of that without computing. With weather forecasting,
in the olden days – well, you know the joke is you have a rope you hang out the window, and when
it’s wet, it must be raining and when it’s dry, it’s sunny out. You know…it wasn’t
quite that bad, but before computers it was very, very difficult to predict the weather.
Now we can predict the weather with a pretty good degree of reliability. What they call
the skill scores are vastly better today than they were even a decade or two ago, let alone
50 years ago. These are huge changes. But more than that, if I want to understand how
does a tornado work? What’s really going on inside a tornado? Well here’s a really
bad way to go about it; I could walk around inside that tornado.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: That’s not the best plan – that’s an example of too dangerous. But on the other
hand, if I simulate it, I can virtually walk around inside my virtual tornado at no risk.
And if I think about expense, you know the, the airplane manufacturers – they used to
have to build dozens of prototypes. It’s incredibly expensive to do that. It’s very
time consuming, and people die when they fly them. Now they’ve gone from dozens of prototypes
down to typically for a new, newly released kind of air vehicle, typically they’ll do
two or three.
>>Dr. McGovern: Because the—
>>Dr. Neeman: And the savings – but they’ll do zillions of simulations. So they actually
understand the vehicle better than they used to, but vastly cheaper.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right. That’s a great answer of how it’s fundamentally transforming everything.
And I was going to add for the weather one thought. They have all these new weather radars
>>Dr. Neeman: Mhmm.
>>Dr. McGovern: –that exist. And I don’t think that they could ingest and understand that
data without the supercomputers as well.
>>Dr. Neeman: It’s fascinating. When those weather radars first came online, the, the
only technology that was affordable at the time for moving data from the weather radar
to the supercomputers that were going to use it to do the simulations – they had phone
modems running at 56 kilobits per second.
>>Dr. McGovern: Wow.
>>Dr. Neeman: Right? And they would completely max those out with the data that was coming
off the radars. Now, of course, they can wire them up with one or 10 or 100 megabit lines
affordably, because network technology has improved – in fact, even faster than computing
technology has improved. But none of that would have been conceivable – all those
radars would have been sitting there producing very little value if not for the ability to
first gather that data and then send it out to the supercomputers at very high speeds.
So that’s been hugely important to our ability to, to forecast the weather, and so have satellites.
And all of that satellite technology has been deeply dependent on improvements in computing.
>>Dr. McGovern: Right. So that brings me to my next question, which is that they’re
learning about why or how computers have changed the world and then how has the Internet changed
the world. So –
>>Dr. Neeman: Right. And, and so the answer to the question about the Internet, there’s
really two pieces to it: there’s the things piece and there’s the people piece. So on
the things side, we went from – I remember when I was an undergrad, I had a little – it
wasn’t even a PC; we didn’t have that term back then. But I had a little computer,
and it had a little phone modem that would do 300 bits per second. And I felt myself
fortunate because I didn’t have to go into the computer lab to work on a project. And
that worked great until I ran out of – we were given allocations for how much time we could have,
and I ran out. And then I had to call the professor at home during dinner. He was way
better about it than I would’ve been. [Dr. McGovern laughs] And he actually got me an
additional allocation, I was able to finish the project. But nowadays networks are typically
running a bill—a million to a billion times that fast. And so the amount of data that we can
move is phenomenal, –
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: – but it’s also always improving. So we’re having to invent new words for
how big things are, right? We know words like kilobyte and megabyte and gigabyte; now we
know people are typically familiar with terabyte. Coming along is petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte
and yottabyte, and they’re already working on inventing words for amounts of data bigger
than yottabyte.
>>Dr. McGovern: That’s hard to imagine.
>>Dr. Neeman: It, it, it’s hard to imagine, but soon enough it’ll be on your desk. And
that’s really the amazing thing – you know famously Bill Gates was quoted many,
many years ago saying, “Well I can’t imagine that somebody’s going to need more than
640 kilobytes of RAM.”
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: Now we can’t imagine 640 kilobytes of CPU cache, right? That, the, the change that we’ve
experienced is unbelievable, and, and really there’s a beautiful thought experiment underlying
this – and then I’ll get back to the whole Internet, people part. But there’s a beautiful
thought experiment you can do. So a typical undergrad, a, a, not a returning student,
but a, an undergrad coming out of high school to one significant figure is about 20 years
old, and life expectancy in the U.S. to one significant figure is about 80. So a typical
undergrad has about 60 years left. And I know you think that’s a long time. Believe me,
it goes like that. [snaps] But that 60 years – well computing speed is doubling every
two years, so that 60 years there’s going to be 30 doublings. Two to the thirtieth is
a billion. So what you’ve got on your desk today compared to what you’ll have on your
desk the day you die – well, the day before you die. The day you die it’s not that useful.
[Dr. McGovern laughs] But the day before you die, the machine on your desk is going to
be a billion times bigger and faster than what you’ve got on your desk today. We can’t
possibly imagine what we’re going to do with all that computing power; we do know
it’s going to be amazing. So – now getting back to your question about the Internet.
What’s really changed is not the technology. That’s marched on, and that’s wonderful,
and I’m in the technology business, so all of that stuff jazzes me up. But the really
amazing thing that’s happened is our ability to communicate with one another; it has fundamentally
transformed. You know, the way you and I communicated when we were in grade school, right? We didn’t
have any of these newfangled cell phones and all that sort of thing. But the way that people
can communicate now – it’s changed how we run our lives. So it used to be you couldn’t
run right up to the deadline on some assignment, because if something went wrong you couldn’t
pick up the phone and expect the other person to answer; now they’re carrying their phone
on their hip, and you can get them 24/7. And in fact if they don’t answer their phone,
you’re annoyed at them, because you’ve got an expectation that people can be reached
on demand. That’s fundamentally different from how people lived even 30 years ago, and
that change has made it possible to do our work in ways that were unimaginable back then.
You know, if you’ve seen pictures of people carrying around the first cell phones, and
they were the size of like, a stack of bricks and they weighed about as much as a stack
of bricks. And if you were lucky, there were maybe three or four cities in the country
where you could use them, and the sound quality was awful – but it was better than nothing.
And now you’ve got these tiny little things – actually they’ve gotten bigger now,
because now we’re all playing games on them and watching videos – but you’ve got these
tiny little things that can do more than the fastest supercomputers of 30 years ago. It’s
just incredible. And that’s lead to – we can tell each other not only, you know, here’s a
picture of what I had for lunch today, which may or may not be of interest to your friends.
But you know, “I’m going to go over to see such-and-such show or I’m going to go to
such-and-so park and hang out. Anybody want to come with?” People just show up. That
was unimaginable 30 years ago.
>>Dr. McGovern: Well and in the research land, you can collaborate with people in different
countries that you possibly – you couldn’t even imagine at all.
>>Dr. Neeman: Right.
>>Dr. McGovern: And now you can –
>>Dr. Neeman: And, and, I’ve got colleagues all over the world now. And if I’ve got
a question, I can just shoot an email over to them and in five minutes I’ve got an
answer, assuming they’re not asleep. But they’ve got an answer for me. Again, not
something you could’ve imagined 30 years ago.
>>Dr. McGovern: Well and I was thinking along the lines of the Internet, another thing you
can do is video conferences – >>Dr. Neeman: Mhmm.
>>Dr. McGovern: – with people around the world. We’re constantly scheduling – I
have a group of colleagues that are scattered across like five different time zones. And
we’re trying to make our meetings, we’re all saying, “Oh this time zone. No, this
time,” you know?
>>Dr. Neeman: You’ve got to pick a time when everybody can be awake, and there’s
always one –
>>Dr. McGovern: Right.
>>Dr. Neeman: – poor schmo who has to do it in the middle of the night.
>>Dr. McGovern: There, there is. But you couldn’t even have done that before. You couldn’t have had
>>Dr. Neeman: That’s absolutely correct.
>>Dr. McGovern: – those meetings.
>>Dr. Neeman: Right.
>>Dr. McGovern: So I know that, you know, another thing that the Internet can do – when soldiers
deploy now, they can actually keep in contact with their families. When my dad deployed
I was 10, we could call him once a week because a long-distance call to a very far away
country didn't sound so good. We could hardly hear him. It was super expensive, which you can’t
imagine now. And sometimes we called him on ham radio, because that was another way that
we could find him. But there was no Skype or anything else. And it’s a completely
different world now, and I think that’s great.
>>Dr. Neeman: Yeah. It, it’s changed the way that we…relate to one another, and you
know, it’s always a mixed blessing. There are pluses and minuses, but we’re not going
back from that. We’re moving forward to be able to communicate with each other using
these technologies. And another thing that I find absolutely fascinating is now especially
with tablets – they’re becoming so cheap that even in the poorest of countries, for
many people they’re starting to be affordable. In a way that, you know, when we had desktop
PCs it was not imaginable that, that the poorest of the poor could be able to have their own
technology. Now these things are becoming accessible. You know, if you want to buy a
tablet for 35 bucks, you can go on the Wal-Mart website or wherever and you can pick one up.
It’s not going to be the world’s best tablet by any means, but it’ll do the job.
>>Dr. McGovern: I’ve heard some stories about how smart phones are going everywhere
>>Dr. Neeman: Mhmm.
>>Dr. McGovern: – and places that you wouldn’t have imagined either; places that don’t
even have electricity, but they’re using and finding new ways to charge them just so
they can be connected.
>>Dr. Neeman: That’s exactly correct.
>>Dr. McGovern: So is there any other information that we should tell our students, particularly
if they’re interested in OSCER?
>>Dr. Neeman: Right. So if you’re interested in supercomputing, go to www.oscer – with
an E, O-S-C-E-R – ou.edu. And you can learn all about what we’re doing now – and if
you want, you can contact us and we can help you get started learning to use supercomputing.
>>Dr. McGovern: Well thank you very much.
>>Dr. Neeman: Thanks for having me!