Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

SC: The Family Gathering

It's "supercomputing week," which means that almost everyone who can spell HPC and who can walk, drive, swim or fly will be in Austin, Texas during the week of November 16 for SC08. Drawing on my youth, there will be preaching (academic papers, vendor presentations and government meetings), singing (on second thought, maybe not – geeks are not best known for their performing arts ability) and an all day dinner on the grounds (receptions, parties and dinners). In short, it's the place to see and be seen, or perhaps not to be seen if you are spending all of your time in closed door meetings with vendors or government officials.

I have been attending SC (the conference formerly known as Supercomputing XY) since 1990. Sadly, I missed the first one in Florida, where Seymour Cray gave the opening keynote, and the second one in Reno, Nevada. It is interesting to reflect on how much the conference has changed over twenty years.

Remembering the Big Apple

In 1990, the conference was held in a New York hotel. The technical papers presentations were all in a single ballroom, and the small (and I do mean small) vendor booths and demonstrations were in a second, nearby ballroom. I have two particular memories of that 1990 event, beyond a long meeting about trace formats for parallel system performance analysis.

The first concerns the humble beginnings of academic research booth space. Unlike today's massive show floor, with academic and laboratory booths that rival those of major vendors, the research exhibit space consisted of two or three draped tables. I distinctly remember Jack Dongarra sitting at one of the tables with a SUN workstation, demonstrating linear algebra software.

My second memory of 1990 was the apparent disappearance of the Intel vendor booth. As I recall, the truck containing the Intel booth arrived at the hotel loading dock, to be met by a group of workers who assured the driver that hotel rules required them to unload the truck. The truck contents – Intel's booth – disappeared and were (to my knowledge) never seen again. (I always wondered what the thieves did with an exhibit booth. I suspect there were too unhappy groups that day, Intel and the people who absconded with the booth.) Intel did manage to create a very nice booth using some backup materials, however. Welcome to the Big Apple!

Experiencing New Mexico

In 1991, I was a member of the SC program committee, which was chaired by the late Ken Kennedy. That year, the conference was held in Albuquerque, NM, in the convention center, leading to substantial expansion of the scale and scope of the conference.

That year, I created a research booth (a massive 10'x10') space that highlighted the results of our DARPA-sponsored Pablo project and the performance measurement and visualization tools we were developing. I remember that we printed some black-and-white posters to stick on a backdrop and distributed "booth duty" among the group of students, staff and me (the professor).

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) occupied the equally spacious 10'x10' space next to my booth. I remember watching with fascination when the LLNL team arrived on Sunday with several sections of 8' PVC pipe, elbow connectors, and a hacksaw. They then built a frame for their booth. This was literally cutting edge technology from our national laboratories!

Looking Forward to Austin

As always, I am looking forward to the meeting. It is a chance to see old friends, make some new ones, trade rumors and stories, survey the evolution of technology and discuss the future. It will also be a new experience for me, as a member of Microsoft. Kyril Faenov and his team have accomplished some impressive things with Windows HPC Server 2008 and I look forward to seeing the discussion of clouds, multicore and the future of HPC services.

Coming full circle to Seymour Cray, this year, I was pleased to chair the IEEE Seymour Cray Award committee and select my old friend Steve Wallach as the honoree. The award will be presented at SC08. By the way, you might want to check out Steve's new venture – Convey (that's Convex plus one).

In addition to my usual random walk across the convention and exhibit floors, attending technical paper sessions, private meetings and participating in Microsoft events, I will be speaking at several events:

• "Designing Data Centers for Future Cloud Applications," at the Power Efficiency and the Path to Exascale Computing workshop, on Sunday, November 16
• "Will Electric Utilities Give Away Supercomputers with the Purchase of a Power Contract?" a panel on Wednesday, November 19
• "There Is No More Sequential Programming. Why Are We Still Teaching It?"" a parallel programming education at the Intel booth on Wednesday, November 19

Finally, check out Todd Gamblin's Thursday afternoon paper presentation on scalable performance analysis for very large systems. It's pretty cool, though I am biased, as a thesis advisor!

Preaching, singing (well, maybe not) and dinner on the grounds – sounds like fun. I suspect there will a few margaritas and some barbeque consumed as well.

Interesting Times Indeed: Science Debate 2008

I write a quarterly column for the Computing Research Association (CRA)'s newsletter, Computing Research News (CRN). The following is a preview of my upcoming column, which will appear in the November 2008 issue.

That awful gurgling noise you hear in the background is the global economy draining through the hole that is the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. We do not yet how bad the economic downturn will be. However, if history is a guide, we can expect the weakened economy to depress rates of return on university endowments, tighten state budgets due to decreased tax revenues, constrain corporate R&D spending and increase the already large pressure on federal government discretionary spending. In short, we are likely to experience constraints on faculty and researcher hiring and on overall education and research funding

On the latter front, CRA continues to advocate that the America COMPETES Act be fully funded. You will recall that the Act authorizes greater funding for physical science research in the U.S., but no additional funding has been appropriated. (In Washington-speak, computing is a physical science.) As I am sure at least some of you have noticed, this is a U.S. Presidential election year, with its own set of implications for the future of science policy and research funding.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, along with the leaders of many organizations, crafted fourteen questions for the Presidential candidates. (I signed in support on behalf of CRA.) This "Science Debate 2008" includes questions on approaches to research and innovation, education, climate change, energy security, health care, biomedicine and pandemics, space and other topics. The first, and perhaps most important question, concerns innovation:

Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of the American economy since WWII. But several recent reports question America's continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

I encourage you to review the responses to all of the questions from both candidates at www.sciencedebate2008.com. (You might also want to read a recent New York Times assessment.) As I write this in early October, the election campaigns are in full flight, but by the time you read this, the election will have been decided, barring the unexpected, and we will know which of these sets of responses is more likely to become reality.

I can also report that the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), of which I am a member, also recommended that the new President appoint the Presidential Science Advisor as quickly as possible, enabling the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to begin operating expeditiously. My personal hope is that the new President will name the Science Advisor during the transition period after the election and before taking office.

Let us remember that the laurel in the race to the future sometimes goes to the sprinter, but more often the reward accrues to those who have the vision, foresight and persistence to run the long and sometimes enervating marathon that is education, intellectual innovation via research and transfer of good ideas into practice. To hark back to our current financial crisis, the smart money bet (quite literally) is always on innovation.

 

The Long Race for Innovation

Recently, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) met at the National Academy of Sciences to discuss and approve our most recent draft report on research and innovation, entitled, University-Private Sector Research Partnerships in the Innovation Ecosystem. Quoting from the executive summary (note that the final wording may change slightly), the goal of the study was to

… examine approaches to stimulate interactions between the private sector and universities, including new R&D business models that are scalable to a national level. As part of its study, PCAST also considered policies to incentivize interactions and to address potential barriers, such as intellectual property, tax policies, and organizational challenges. The study is aimed at improving the effectiveness of public and private sector research through cooperative investments, expanding interactions among personnel, and increasing opportunities for technology transfer in its broadest sense.

Perhaps coincidently, but more likely because the meme is both pervasive and compelling, this coupling of ecosystem and competitiveness mirrors that in the earlier study (Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World) of the U.S. Networking, Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, which I had the privilege to co-chair.

Although the findings and recommendations of the study are manifold, I took two major ideas away from the presentations and the report. The first is based on a funny but pointed remark from Norm Augustine. The second relates to prizes and their ability to inspire our imaginations.

Norm Said the Stock Dived …

I've always enjoyed the fact that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) staff members rearrange our seating at each PCAST meeting. It gives me a chance to have sidebar conversations with different people during each meeting. At our most recent meeting, I happened to be sitting next to Norm Augustine, the former head of Lockheed-Martin.

Norm is a fascinating guy, with wonderful stories and a piercing belief in the importance of research as the critical enabler of the long-term, global competitiveness of the United States. You may remember that Norm led the group which produced the seminal report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future, which in turn led to the America COMPETES Act. (Despite bipartisan support, the COMPETES Act, which would double federal funding for physical science research, remains unfunded.) But I digress from my story …

During the comment period after the public presentation of the draft PCAST report on the innovation ecosystem, Norm told a wonderful but sad story that could be a parable for our economic times. (Any inaccuracies or errors in the story are mine.) During his time as Lockheed-Martin CEO, Norm said they had identified a set of promising applied research directions that could yield long-term competitive advantage to company, after the requisite time and investment. Pleased and excited by this possibility, he dispatched one of his senior people (a group president, as I remember) to brief the Wall Street financial analysts.

Norm went on to say that the analysts nearly ran from the room at the end of the briefing to sell their Lockheed-Martin stock, which then dropped precipitously on the markets. He noted ruefully that it was nearly two years before the stock recovered to its price before the briefing. Chagrined by this experience, Norm said he asked the analysts at the next briefing why the company had been so punished for its planned R&D investment and for seeking to assure its long-term competitive position. The answer came back clearly and pointedly. Most investors held the stock less than eighteen months, and corporate investment beyond this horizon was viewed as a drain on the corporate coffers.

A Parable for Our Time

Norm told his story to highlight the dangers of short-term thinking and the risk to our competitive future, a point he also made recently in a Science editorial (Vol. 321, No. 5896, p. 1605
September 19, 2008), from which I cannot help but quote an excerpt:

Much has been accomplished since The Gathering Storm was published. A new research university was established, with an opening endowment equal to what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology amassed after 142 years. Next year, over 200,000 students will study abroad, mostly pursing science or engineering degrees, often under government scholarships. Government investment in R&D is set to increase by 25%. An initiative is under way to create a global nanotechnology hub. An additional $10 billion dollars is being devoted to K-12 education, with emphasis on math and science. And a $3 billion dollar add-on to the nation's research budget is in process. Of course, these actions are taking place in Saudi Arabia, China, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, and Russia, respectively. What about in the United States?

The laurel in the race to the future sometimes goes to the sprinter, but more often the reward goes to those who have the vision, foresight and persistence to run the long and sometimes enervating marathon that is education, intellectual innovation and technology commercialization.

Perhaps more pointedly, Norm was quite literally telling his story as the U.S. government was desperately seeking to develop a rescue plan during the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Call it coincidence if you like; I view it as a warning.

Prizes: Powering the Imagination

During the PCAST meetings we heard from a variety of academic, government, industry and non-profit groups. One of the clear messages concerned the power of prizes to catalyze competition and innovation, with the sub-orbital space flight X Prize being the most visible and recent example. PCAST member Fred Kavli's foundation has also offered prizes for scientific innovation.

The incentive for such prizes is rarely the direct financial reward to the winner, but rather the collateral opportunities that accrue to the winner. For example, Paul Allen undoubtedly spent far more on Burt Rutan's Spaceship One than the $10M X Prize, but the international publicity was enormous, and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has booked revenue-paying passengers for future flights.

Even more important than the economic incentives is the power of prizes to focus the imagination and intellectual talent of a community on accomplishing something both difficult and audacious. In that spirit, in 2006 the U.S. Congress directed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a prize program. Also, the National Academy of Sciences recently released a report outlining a series of detailed recommendations for how to conduct a prize program.

Research, Teaching and Service: Dynamic Balance

The following is a preview of my regular column for Computing Research News (CRN), the newsletter of the Computing Research Association (CRA), which will appear in September 2008. Today, corporate employers make much of work-life balance and the importance of workforce development and sustainability. They also strive to inculcate the corporate culture and ethos. Research universities also have a culture and ethos, one that is reinforced by tenure and promotion evaluation criteria and processes.

I worry that we are devaluing teaching and service, to the possible detriment of academia in general and computing in particular. If there is a lesson from the evolution of the American university, it has been its increasing democratization of access and emphasis on delivering value to the children of each generation. We need to remember that.

Advice to a Young Scholar

You are a newly minted Ph.D. recipient, who landed a faculty position at a research university. The fall semester is just beginning, and you are simultaneously excited and a bit apprehensive. University life is unchanged and also surprisingly new – writing research proposals, teaching classes and serving on faculty committees. Your friends and new colleagues are giving you sometimes conflicting advice on time management and priorities. What really matters? How do you choose? How do you find your own path?

Research, teaching and service: they are the standard academic mantra, which one suspects Socrates himself whispered in Plato's ear. The disquieting truth is that we honor them to varying degrees, but often in that rank order. All too often, those of us with graying hair whisper to our junior colleagues, "Focus on your research!" Or, we opine, "You need to be a decent (but not great) teacher to get tenure." Then there's service, where we inevitably say, "Make sure you serve on program committees for good conferences, but leave time consuming service for later."

These are the oft-unspoken rules for success and tenure at major research universities. They define our academic culture, creating expectations and defining behavioral norms, passed across the academic years. I generalize and exaggerate, of course, and the relative emphases on research, teaching and service vary greatly across institutions. However, I find even the generalizations worrisome because the academic child becomes the adult, remembering the lessons of youth. I believe we need better balance, recognizing the criticality of the triumvirate to computing's future.

Rebalancing the Future

Do not misunderstand my comments on balance; our emphasis on research really matters. As I testified to the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee in July, economic growth and innovation are fueled worldwide by information technology research, conducted by talented and engaged faculty at research universities. In my testimony, I urged Congress to fund the America COMPETES Act fully and to encourage greater risk taking in long-term, innovative research across our universities and laboratories. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is also working to foster long-term research agendas; I encourage you to participate.

Nevertheless, our passion and commitment to teaching and education are equally important. We have an image problem in information technology, and I believe we need to rethink our curricula and approaches to computing education, as well as the rewards and recognition we extend to committed educators, if we are to broaden the base of participation in computing and attract the diverse talent needed for the future. The CRA Education Committee (CRA-E), chaired by Andy van Dam, is hard at work on a set of best practices and suggestions for computing education. I know Andy would be delighted to hear your ideas and suggestions.

Remember, though, that Chaucer long ago captured the shared passions for research and teaching that define the best aspects of academic scholarship, "And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." We need to translate those passions into 21^st century reality. Research and teaching are but two manifestations of the same quest. As every young professor has learned, sometimes to his or her chagrin, there is no better way to truly understand something than to teach it.

A final, worrisome cultural manifestation is our occasional reluctance to serve the discipline when the need and opportunity arise. Each generation owes a debt to the preceding one, a debt best repaid to the generation following. Whether it be community advocacy, service as a funding agency program officer, a term as department chair, dean, provost or chancellor, or a host of other important roles, service advances our field and ensures a vibrant, rich and attractive environment for a new generation of students and scholars. Each of us owes a debt to our mentors, our colleagues and our friends. We need to better honor those who serve our community.

The Triumvirate

Research, teaching, service; these three points define a plane of excellence. We need not sacrifice one for another. Teach, explore and serve – in balance. We will all be better for it.

Rikei Banare and Global Competition

On Saturday, May 17, the New York Times ran a front page story (below the fold) on the dearth of Japanese students entering science and engineering fields. Japanese universities call it rikei banare or "flight from science." The article notes:

The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

The article continues by relating comments from Japanese students that they prefer high-paying jobs in disciplines that do not require the long hours and hard work associated with science and technology careers.

Does this sound familiar? It should, as we in the U.S. are also struggling to attract enough students into computing disciplines with marketing campaigns, curricula changes and outreach programs. These outreach programs are critically important, because we and other science and engineering disciplines have for too long failed to include a sufficiently broad and diverse community in computing. We can and must do better, for both ethical and practical reasons.

International Competition

At roughly the same time as the New York Times article appeared, Georgia Tech's Technology Policy and Assessment Center (TPAC) released its bi-annual "High-Tech Indicators" report. Via TPAC's metrics, China has now surpassed the United States in a key measure of international competitiveness. On a 100 point scale, China's technological standing is 82.8, versus the United States at 76.1. While China's ranking increased from 22.5 in 1996 to 82.8 in 2007, the United States ranking peaked at 95.4 in 1999. Equally tellingly, if the European Union were considered as a single entity, it too would have surpassed the United States.

This is not news to those of us in the computing and technology world. Global competition is fierce and international companies seek competitive advantage wherever they can find it. As Manufacturing and Technology News put it, there has been "no Sputnik moment" to awaken the broader population to the competitive challenge and the need for an internationally competitive knowledge workforce.

Looking Ahead

Without doubt, there has always been ennui about the next generation and their interests. Many of us have heard the old saw about walking five miles in the snow-- barefoot -- to school and that it was uphill both ways. In my case, my late father regularly asked me if I were ever going to get a "real" job. (Perhaps my now working at Microsoft qualifies as a real job!)

Generational jocularity aside, in a technological society where continued economic vitality depends on knowledge creation, a qualified pool of knowledge workers is the only truly renewable resource. Smart, educated people will always be in short supply. Each country's long-term competitiveness depends on having enough such people to engage their international peers. The "Gathering Storm" report made this point clearly and pointedly.

Closer to home in computing, Andy Grove got it exactly right when he famously said that only the paranoid survive. However, most people do not realize what he really said. The full quotation is more thoughtful and thought provoking:

Success breeds complacency.

Complacency breeds failure.

Only the paranoid survive