Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Extraordinary Times, Challenges and Opportunities

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 May 2009 issue.

The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, once remarked, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." So it is with economic and social crises; they can be understood retrospectively, but must be experienced in the moment. Without doubt, these are extraordinary times, with global socioeconomic transformations most of us have heretofore experienced only via historical accounts and the stories of our elders.

Public universities are experiencing state budget recisions and reductions, and private institutions have seen the market value and operating income from endowments decline precipitously. University staff positions are being eliminated, unpaid furloughs are common, and even tenured faculty members are worried, given the financial exigency clause in most contracts. Future students fret about the cost of a college education, current students are struggling to pay tuition, and graduates face bleak job prospects across diverse disciplines.

Reinventing the University

Although these extraordinary times bring extraordinary challenges, they also bring extraordinary opportunities. Because necessity really is the mother of invention, we have a generational occasion to rethink university programs, priorities and structures; refocus corporate governance, markets and priorities; and sharpen government policies, structures and strategies. Let's consider a few lessons, leavened by history.

The modern, American university has evolved from a finishing school for the male heirs of landed gentry to a much more inclusive engine of social change, intellectual discovery and economic growth. Each punctuated step in that evolution was triggered by social and economic upheaval, from the Morrill Act of 1862, which created the land-grant institutions, through the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, which opened college education to returning veterans, to the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, which addressed odious injustice and further democratized educational access.

The nature and importance of colleges and universities and their relation to our future continue to change. The proximate skills acquired via the university experience may help land one's first job, convey the lifelong right to cheer for the athletic teams and forever encumber one with annual calls for donations from the alumni association. However, when technological change can dissolve entire industries within just a few years, and grim statistics highlight the demise of lifelong employment, those skills alone will not suffice to land one's fifth or eighth job.

This suggests that we must ask fundamental questions about the nature and role of universities, and we must renegotiate the social compact between citizens and educators. What is the appropriate balance between intellectual inquiry and practical engagement? What constitutes engaged scholarship? What are the "mechanical and industrial arts" for the 21^st century? What are the verities, the intellectual and operational truths that now dance as shadows in Plato's Cave? In short, what is the 21^st century research university and its rightful role?

I humbly suggest that universities, government and industry must rethink the nature of university education and engagement, shifting aggressively to lifelong, rather than punctuated education, and fostering multilateral science and technology incubation and support. We are not imprisoned in the ivory tower, nor are we cloistered from personal engagement.

The American research university has changed radically and repeatedly over the past century. It emerged from Cold War as a government-funded instrument of social change, economic competitiveness and national security. There is no reason, indeed ample precedent to the contrary, to believe that it will not continue to evolve rapidly and radically. The current culture is not sacrosanct, nor should it be. We in computing should be at the vanguard, shaping the definitions and the future of education, research and service.

A Final, Personal Note

As a member of the CRA Board for the past decade, it has been my pleasure to work with all of you on a topic near and dear to my heart – the future of computing research, education and policy. Whether on the Board or in the community, you have always answered the call to service, regardless of the task. It has also been a joy to work with the CRA staff in Washington, DC. They work tirelessly for our community, often with inadequate public acknowledgment of the importance of their contributions. On behalf of the entire computing research community, to them and to you, I want to say publicly and clearly – thank you!

In addition to being a member of the CRA Board, it has been my privilege to serve as CRA Chair for the past four years, and it is time for the inevitable and always beneficial changing of the guard. I am delighted that Peter Lee has been elected as my successor. It has been my pleasure to work with Peter in a variety of roles over the past several years. In each case, I have seen him bring new ideas, passion and enthusiasm, and I know CRA will be in great hands under his leadership.

Although my term is ending, rest assured that I will continue to be an active partner and participant in computing research policy and strategy, working with CRA and other organizations to advance the cause of computing. Remember, it's the love, the passion and the wonder that make computing, indeed any calling, worthwhile and fulfilling.

Twitter Is Three

Yesterday (March 21, 2009), Twitter, the microblogging service, turned three years old. I've been twittering for two years now, watching the evolution of social networking and the nature of the participants. (Yeah, I had a Blackberry back in 2000-2001, long mobile email became an international addiction, but then I'm a gadget geek.) Twitter is now growing exponentially according to Nielsen Wire, with unique visitors up over 1000 percent since one year ago.

Twitter would not have been possible in the U.S. a decade ago, as we lacked the ubiquitous smartphones and broadband coverage needed for mobile access. However, if one recalls the popularity of the short message service (SMS) in Europe and Asia, Twitter could easily have appeared as a value-added service long ago. After all, GSM has been around since the 1980s. It remains an open question, however, if Twitter can be a profitable business.

Extended Friends

Like its big brother, Facebook, Twitter has gone mainstream, with attributions and social discussions in the popular press. Indeed, some have argued that Twitter is the new Facebook, favored by the digerati. All of this reminds me of Yogi Berra's famous remark about a restaurant, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

In both the Facebook and Twitter worlds, it does seem crowded. I am now being "friended" by some people I barely know, and by others I do not know at all. (I am sure many of you have had the same experience.) I am not complaining; rather I have realized that friend in this context is a very elastic thing, ranging from long-time personal friend to an extended network of business acquaintances. Who would have thought one would need information visualization tools like Friend Wheel to track one's "friends"?

Interacting Networks

Like web search engines and the social insights one can glean from tracking queries (e.g., Google's tracking of flu trends), analyzing and visualizing tweets can illuminate social dynamics and behavior. Watching Twittervision, Twitter StreamGraphs or TwittEarth can at times be fascinating but can also overwhelm one with the minutia of daily life. (A trip to the gas station is not an event of historic proportions.) Such is the nature of a global social dynamic.

I also find it interesting that these extended social networking sites are themselves increasingly interconnected. For example, my Twitter updates appear on my blog and my Facebook page. Conversely, excerpts and links from my blog posts appear on Twitter via TwitterFeed and are also replicated on Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. In between, there's microblogging (a tumblelog) with Tumblr – hpcdan.tumblr.com).

Perhaps in the limiting case, all of my social networks can simply chat about me among themselves. They are probably more interesting than I am.

Electronic CACM Is Now Live

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the Communications of the ACM (CACM) was about to "go live," together with a series of blogs, including one written by yours truly. CACM is now live, and the blog (Blog@CACM) is live as well. My first two blog entries are entitled Pipelining, Computing Innovation and Economic Growth and Connecting the Two Ends: Mobile Clouds.

I will be writing for CACM roughly every two weeks.

CRA Taulbee Survey: Computing Enrollments

The latest edition of the CRA Taulbee Report has just been released, and it shows that enrollments in computer science, which is one part of the larger information technology educational ecosystem, are increasing. The CRA's official press release is available here, with comments from yours truly. Moreover, John Markoff did a story for the NY Times. To be sure, there are deep issues tied to the economy, the sociology of computing, diversity and inclusion in computing, and enabling innovation and discovery. Still, this is encouraging news.

By the way, the survey is named after Orrin E. Taulbee, University of Pittsburgh, who conducted these surveys from 1974-1984 for the Computer Science Board (the predecessor organization to the Computing Research Association).

Scientific Clouds: Blowin’ in the Wind

N.B. I recently responded to some questions from John West (HPCWire) regarding the Microsoft Cloud Computing Futures (CCF) research project. In that Q&A, I also commented on the relevance of cloud computing to computational science. What follows is an augmented subset of the Q&A, but focused on just the relevance of clouds to technical computing.

Cirrus, stratus, altostratus, cumulus: they are the scientific names of the common clouds. They drift across the sky, reflecting the changing wind and weather. A new front is blowing into computational science, and cloud computing will soon advance scientific and engineering discovery.

That is one of the reasons I am excited about cloud services. I believe we are at a technological transition point, just as profound as that engendered by the "attack of the killer micros." This is true whether you are enamored of Microsoft's Azure, Amazon's AWS or Google's Apps.

Learning from History

Let's step back and gain some perspective, starting with the "Branscomb pyramid" ("From Desktop to TeraFlop: Exploiting the U.S. Lead in High Performance Computing, Lewis Branscomb et al) and the diverse types of technical computing that now exist. We tend to focus on the apex of the computing pyramid, now exemplified by petascale systems intended to support only a handful of applications and users. However, most science is conducted at lower levels of the pyramid, using desktop computers, laboratory clusters and university-scale computing infrastructure. By analogy, it's exciting to talk about international hypersonic transport, but most people care more about efficiently and painlessly commuting to work each day.

Over the past decade, we successfully leveraged commodity hardware to create large clusters. What was nearly heretical when we first deployed clusters at NCSA is now commonplace. However, this scaling has not been without cost. Cluster programming remains difficult at scale, we have turned a generation of researchers into parallel programmers and system administrators, institutions are struggling with rising demands for machine space, power and cooling, and duplicated facilities make sharing expertise and data difficult. We are heavily focused on computing at a time when data analysis now dominates much of science and engineering. Like many of you, I contributed to this state of affairs, and I feel some responsibility to help us find a new path.

Hype and Reality

Let's separate the hype from the reality. Clouds won't magically restore your 401(k) retirement fund, cure halitosis or even help you drop twenty pounds before your upcoming high school reunion. Like all new technologies, however, they challenge some conventional computing wisdom and change some of our operating assumptions.

Personal computing was a non sequitur when computers filled rooms. Internet search was nonsensical when there were only a handful of research web sites. Social networking services depend on inexpensive, ubiquitous broadband access and mobile devices. Hosted cloud services and software are now possible given the confluence of inexpensive but powerful multicore processors, high-capacity storage, broadband networks and the economies of scale that consolidation in cloud data centers make possible.

Five Reasons Clouds Matter

First, the economies of scale from mega-data center provisioning mean capital and operating costs can be lower. When buying servers in 500,000 unit lots and designing facilities at scale, the provider does have some financial and technical leverage. This would allow universities, laboratories and federal agencies to devote a larger fraction of precious funding to research rather than infrastructure. Remember Dan's computational science corollary; it's the science, not the infrastructure, which matters.

Second, truly large-scale data analysis, particularly multidisciplinary data fusion, can become routine. In the scientific community, we have worked hard to build workflows for access to distributed data. Consolidation and co-location enable new approaches, and we tend to forget that cloud data centers have many, many petabytes of disk storage. It really is possible to query multiple petabytes of data using intuitive, easy-to-use desktop tools – the business community does it all the time. Jim Gray proved the power of database tools on several scientific data analysis projects, including the SkyServer.

Third, clouds facilitate time-space tradeoffs. It is just as cost-effective to run 100,000 individual jobs simultaneously as sequentially (e.g., for a parameter study), something that our batch queuing strategies strongly discourage on high-performance computing systems. In geek terms, the area is the same, whether one uses tall, skinny rectangles (lots of resources for a small interval) or short, long rectangles (a few resources for a long interval). The elasticity of clouds, a consequence of multiplexing many users and workloads, means that the resources are always available without waiting.

Fourth, I also believe that the cloud will offer HPC services at increasing scale, beginning with that typified by today's laboratory clusters. This is already happening, and as I/O device virtualization continues to improve, communication latencies will decrease and tightly coupled computations will be attractive at ever larger scale.

Finally, clouds can provide seamless extension of familiar desktop tools and interfaces, allowing computing and analysis to scale within the same environment that researchers use every day. We can leverage consumer software, just as we have leveraged consumer hardware. There is no reason our computational science tools and our "every day" tools need be different.

Shameless Microsoft Plug

To this point, I've written about clouds in a vendor-neutral sense. With a nod to the company name now on my paycheck, if you haven't already, I encourage you to take a look at Windows Azure and its cloud computing and storage services. In addition to rich web services, there is both open source and Visual Studio programming support. In a future post, I will describe an Azure example application for computational science. Here endeth the marketing pitch.

Insight, Not Infrastructure

As Richard Hamming famously noted, "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." Dan's computational science corollary is simple, "The purpose of computational science infrastructure is scientific discovery, not big iron bragging rights." It's time to focus on what matters and embrace the future. Our graduate students and post-docs will thank us.

Blogging at CACM Also

When I was a graduate student at Purdue, just after the dinosaurs died and the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event was recent news, I was an avid reader of the Communications of the ACM. CACM, pronounced Kak-M, was an ACM research journal that contained great articles that spanned the breadth of computing. As the ACM attempted to deliver greater value to the majority of its members, who were practitioners, rather than researchers, CACM morphed into a practice-oriented publication. Those of us in research gradually turned to other publication venues and rarely spent much time reading CACM. All of that has now changed.

My friend, Moshe Vardi (Rice University), is the new editor-in-chief of CACM, with a mission and mandate to revamp CACM and make it more relevant, more readable and more relevant – both to practitioners and to researchers. The print version of the new CACM has been well received, and ACM is about to launch a new CACM web site this month (March 2009).

Several of us will be blogging for the new CACM web site, offering perspectives on science policy, research, computing technology and societal implications. Look for me at the CACM web site soon, under Blog@CACM. (And yes, I will continue to blog on Reed's Ruminations at www.hpcdan.org as well.)

The Power of Plum Jelly

The dilapidated two story house marked the corner of two single lane roads in the Arkansas hills, and it was old and weather-beaten long before I was born. The windows stared sullenly at the sky, covered only by cheap roller shades that had never seen better days. A rusted tin roof (iron actually, but we called it tin), covered the house, hammered by the summer rains.

The old man who sat on the house's little porch was as tired and gray as the ramshackle house. He was divorced, a small scandal in the churchgoing town, and like the tin roof, he had been hammered by life's insistent pains. No family visited and no children called; he had neither telephone nor car. He looked forward to nothing. He was a patient man, though, and he sat quietly and without complaint, waiting to die.

I knew all this from observation, as I rode my bicycle along the dirt roads around his house and mine; I'd also heard the furtive whispers of divorce when my parents and grandparents talked about him. Everyone called him "Ole Man" Smith. It was such a common moniker that only later did I realize that "Ole Man" was not his first name.

The Canning Frenzy

Summer was the time for gardening and canning, for my family, like those around us, depended on home-canned food to see us through the winter. Because we were poor, we canned green beans, poke greens, peaches and corn, and we either froze juice or made jelly from blackberries, strawberries and plums. It was a frenzy of picking, cleaning, processing and storing. It was my mother's summer duty, and it was my job to help when and where I could.

During the few weeks the plums ripened, we picked them from our trees and from the ground. They were small, no bigger than the end of my thumb, struggling to grow in the rocky clay. The first time I saw plums in a city grocery store, I was stunned; they were nearly the size of tennis balls! I shook my head in wonderment at how hard my mom had worked to make jelly from those small plums. But I digress …

After pulling the stems and cutting away the bad spots with a knife, the plums are washed and then squeezed with a colander to produce the juice. After adding some sugar and pectin, the mixture was ready to pour into the Mason or Ball jars and place in the pressure cooker.

It was hot and tiring summer work. As my grandfather would say, it was "warm, powerful warm." When it's 95F in the shade, it's 110F in the kitchen, with steam escaping the pressure cooker and hot jars cooling on the windowsill. I've seen those jars explode, flinging hot peaches and syrup across room. It's not a pretty sight.

In the middle of all this, my mother looked out the kitchen window at Ole Man Smith sitting on his porch in front of the old house across the road. Without ado, she announced, "We're making plum jelly for him." And so we did.

The Gift of Jelly

A week later, I marched up to Ole Man Smith's front porch. I was holding my box of cargo carefully in both hands. I wasn't very big, it was heavy, and I knew I'd best not drop it and break the jars. "My momma asked me to bring this to you," I said. "She made it for you," I added.

I watched a panoply of expressions play across his face. First, there was the fear that I was selling plum jelly door-to-door. He fumbled with this wallet, pulling a few dog-eared one dollar bills from inside. I assured him that my momma had told me two things, very clearly. First, that I was to deliver this box of jelly jars to him. Second, and even more importantly, under no circumstances was I to accept any money from him in return.

"It's a gift from her," I added unnecessarily.

Fear was replaced by surprise that my momma had thought of him. Gratitude and appreciation soon followed. There was enough jelly to last a man all winter, perhaps even two winters.

"I reckon this will go real good with some biscuits," he said.

As he picked up the box, he turned and said, "Tell your momma, I'm much obliged." Then he did something I'd never seen him do before – he smiled.

The Lesson Learned

I walked home feeling all warm inside, knowing that even as the delivery boy I'd done a good thing. That one box of plum jelly taught me more about the power of unexpected kindness than a hundred Sunday school lessons. It really was more blessed to give than to receive.

I realized much later that she sent me as the delivery boy to save her and the old man the embarrassment of a gift offered and a gift gratefully accepted. Though she never said so, I suspect it was also so that I might be a part of the gift.

As we face difficult economic times, with people losing jobs and houses, seeing hopes dashed and dreams deferred, it's important to remember the power of simple kindness. Support your neighbor, do a good deed, help a stranger. Even the small things matter, sometimes they matter most of all.

Together, we can make a difference, and we will each be better for it. The plum jelly taught me that.