High-Performance Computing Needs to Be Simplified, Democratized

Alan Alda told me how to write this article.

What does “Hawkeye” Pierce from TV's “M*A*S*H” know about writing an article about high-performance computing (HPC)? Quite a bit, it turns out. During his keynote of last week's SC15 conference in Austin, TX, Alda said he has always loved science and technology, but when hosting PBS' “Scientific American Frontiers” TV series he experienced first-hand how difficult it was for those in the know to explain their research in a way he, a layman, could understand. He later founded The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University to “enhance understanding of science by helping train the next generation of scientists and health professionals to communicate more effectively with the public, public officials, the media and others outside their own discipline.”

Alan Alda begins #SC15 keynote by asking if there's something about their work they wished public understood more. pic.twitter.com/KJcZ9qSTrP

— Desktop Engineering (@DEeditor) November 17, 2015

So, I'm going to try to write this clearly and concisely. Plus, I'll kick it off with a fact shamelessly intended to grab your attention: People are dying because scientists and engineers don't communicate well.

Think about it. The odds are pretty good that some of the more than 7 billion people in the world right now have the potential to solve some of humanity's greatest problems. That would mean the answers for massive amounts of clean energy, the solution to the global water shortage, the cure for cancer and more are already out there. Those people just need access to the right training, data and tools to change the world. HPC is chief among those tools. The more people who understand the potential of HPC, the faster those life-saving transformations will take place. Communication is critically important because it's a roadblock to technological advancement. Lives are literally at stake when technological breakthroughs are not realized as quickly as they could be. Better communication of highly technical information could secure research funding or expose the people with the next technological epiphany to the tools they need to prove it.

It doesn't matter what you say if they don't get it.

— Alan Alda

SC15's theme “HPC Transforms” was illustrated again and again at the show, from the ability to model our [lightbox full=“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QABMJapCIXo&feature=youtu.be”]impact on climate change[/lightbox], to patient-specific [lightbox full=“https://youtu.be/HOEAocq_U5o”]approaches for epilepsy treatment[/lightbox], to creating [lightbox full=“https://youtu.be/1o4YViBAGU0”]longer-lasting batteries[/lightbox]. But, “before the high-performance computing transformation takes place, we may have to transform the way communication takes place,” Alda said.

I understood the wisdom of that statement as I listened to the various SC15 presentations and spoke to people on the show floor. During one highly technical presentation that I admit I could barely follow, I looked around and saw people staring into their phones. Maybe they were telling their social circles all about the groundbreaking research being presented, but I don't think so. I saw a few people sleeping through the presentation. The day before, Alda said technical people should present their research and ideas with “emotion and excitement,” so people would understand and remember them, but the monotone speaker and text-heavy slides weren't meeting that goal.

Alda also said many technical people suffer from the “curse of knowledge,” where they forget that the person they're communicating with may not know what they know. If the presenter wasn't getting through to the record-setting 12,000+ SC15 attendees, most of whom speak the same technical language of HPC, I knew a layman — even an expert in another highly technical field like medicine, engineering or climatology — would not be able to fully grasp the significance of what was being presented. I wonder if attendees from other industries were inspired to pursue the implementation of HPC to solve problems in their disciplines, or scared off by the jargon and complexity?

Spreading the Benefits of HPC

Intel’s Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group spoke quite clearly during the “HPC Matters” plenary session the night before Alda's keynote: “It's still to hard to use, too hard to access,” she said of HPC. She provided numerous examples of how HPC was transforming science and science was transforming HPC, but she also said only 10% of U.S. manufacturers are using HPC.

It's not a new problem. In 2013, the SC conference organizers launched HPC Matters to “encourage members of the computational sciences community to share their thoughts, vision, and experiences with how high performance computers are used to improve the lives of people all over the world in more simple terms,” according to the organization. It's also one of the reasons SC15 put descriptors on each of the sessions in the online schedule, letting people know whether they were “HPC Beginner Friendly.” It's one of the reasons Intel is committed to providing $1.5 million over five years to encourage under-represented populations to pursue computer science.

[gallery columns=“4” link=“none” ids=”/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-10-00-00-AM-e1448303488471.jpg|Actor and science advocate Alan Alda keynoted SC15.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-16-6-37-08-PM-e1448303319327.jpg|Intel's Diane Bryant is welcomed to the stage by SC15 general chair Jackie Kern, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-16-6-47-05-PM-e1448303335188.jpg|Intel Senior Fellow Mark Bohr: Moore's Law is “absolutely not” dead/dying.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-16-8-00-06-PM-e1448303389184.jpg|SC15 set attendance records with more than 12,000 people making the trip to Austin this year.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-11-10-54-AM-e1448303555576.jpg|Volunteers from academia, government and industry have again delivered the SCinet infrastructure to support SC15.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-11-28-18-AM-e1448303627778.jpg|Scenes from the SC15 show floor.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-11-28-45-AM-e1448303643262.jpg|Scenes from the SC15 show floor.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-11-31-29-AM-e1448303684417.jpg|Scenes from the SC15 show floor.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-5-46-04-PM-e1448303717151.jpg|Scenes from the SC15 show floor.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-11-29-54-AM-e1448303697221.jpg|Scenes from the SC15 show floor.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-5-43-32-PM-e1448302912735.jpg|NEC's vector-based processors Vector processors can improve performance on certain workloads, such as numerical simulation.,/article/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Photo-Nov-17-12-24-48-PM-e1448303981523.jpg|Charles Wuischpard, VP of the Data Center Group and GM of the HPC Platform Group for Intel shows off Xeon Phi. “]

On a broader level, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, IBM and others all announced initiatives and technologies to make HPC more “open” and easier to implement. For example, Intel's Scalable System Framework (SSF) is designed to provide an end-to-end means of implementing HPC. Read DE Senior Editor Kenneth Wong's post on the announcements here. One early SSF partner is Dell, who will be focusing on bringing HPC to manufacturing and other industries.

“HPC is no longer a tool only for the most sophisticated researchers,“said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Engineered Solutions and Cloud, Dell via a press release. “We’re taking what we’ve learned from working with some of the most advanced, sophisticated universities and research institutions and customizing that for delivery to mainstream enterprises.”

In Dell's booth at SC15, Ganthier said the company's new HPC portfolio is all about disruption and democratization. Dell will do the HPC provisioning and deployment for its customers so they don't need to worry about creating an HPC infrastructure. It will also create reference architectures customized for individual industries that it will then further customize for its individual clients. For example, the Dell HPC System for Manufacturing is designed for customers who need to run finite element analysis (FEA) for structural analysis via workstations, clusters or both. Dell is currently working with ANSYS and CD-adapco STAR-CCM+ on the solution. Dell also announced a new expansion of its Dell HPC Innovation Lab in cooperation with Intel to support Intel's SSF. The lab is intended to spread the benefits of HPC open standards, networking and storage technologies.

Altair is also an early SSF partner. At SC15, the company announced it would open source its HPC workload manager, PBS Professional, next year. “The vast majority of the 'missing middle' of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) just don't know what HPC can do for them,” said Dr. Bill Nitzberg, CTO of Altair's PBS Works at PBS Works' SC15 booth. “We want to make it more approachable.”

“Open” and “approachable” were the buzzwords of this years' SC conference. At DE, we'll take Alda's advice to heart and do our best to go beyond the buzzwords to explain how hardware and software vendors are working to make HPC more available to engineers.

The communication of an idea “doesn’t exist until it gets into other person’s head,” Alda said. “All of science and technology is a collaboration. Good communication is a requirement.”

Listen to Alda talk about the importance of HPC communication in this conversation with SC’s Jorge Salazar:

Click here for more of DE's SC15 coverage.