Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Digital Inclusion

As an international traveler, if you ever stood in the central Tokyo train station during rush hour, clutching a ticket in your hand and looking helplessly about, you know the feeling. If you ever stared hopelessly at a Cyrillic menu while seated in a restaurant off the beaten path in Moscow, you know the feeling. Finally, for the aging geeks among us, if you have ever tried to read someone else's APL program, you know the feeling.

It is the feeling of illiteracy and exclusion, of being unable to participate in the milieu, frustrated and dismayed, unable to communicate and understand. In the three cases above, a kindly Japanese businessman rescued me, I ordered food via hand gestures and self-deprecating smiles, and I spent some long hours reconstructing programmer intent.

Inclusion and access shape our lives. Highlighting this, a New York Times article, "Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees," recently reported the results of a study that used Facebook data to compute the electronic separation of Facebook participants. It was an electronic update to the oft-repeated adage that six degrees of separation connect all denizens of the planet. The results speak to the power of our electronic networks and highlight, by exception, another form of separation.

It is an equally pernicious exclusion, one crossing cultures, countries and languages. It makes no distinction between the literate and the illiterate. An economic and cultural chasm, a digital divide, separates the digitally connected from those who lack the ways or the means to join the digital community. In a knowledge economy, the separated are cut off from a plethora of services, educational materials, and business prospects.

If we are to address inequality and create opportunities for economic advancement, this must change. It is a global need, not simply a question of developed versus developing country access. The digitally disenfranchised are all around us. In some parts of the world, broadband access is an unattainable dream, beyond the economic reach of entire families. In other places, it is a non-trivial fraction of a month's income. In still others, it is either not available or its performance is inadequate. (See Broadband: Oxygen for a Digital World)

Digital inclusion matters to every society and government, for addressing inequity and access facilities better education, improved health and economic development. If we have learned anything from the history of previous economic malaises, it is that innovation and economic growth are the keys to financial recovery. Digital inclusion is one of the enablers, a catalyst for the exchange of ideas.

As I recently remarked at the closing ceremonies of the ITU Telecom World, this is not the responsibility of any one institution. The responsibility lies with all of us. No one need digitally disenfranchised.

SC11: The Cray, Fernbach and Kennedy Awards

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog.

This week is the annual gathering of the supercomputing faithful at SC11, held this year in Seattle. Jointly sponsored by ACM and IEEE, the conference attracts roughly ten thousand attendees. Only a handful of U.S. sites can now host it due to the space requirements for the technical program and the trade show. Unless the Washington State Convention Center expands, this will be the last time Seattle will host the conference.

This is the 24^th year of the conference and my 21^st year of attendance. I look forward to it eagerly each time. For many of us, the conference is a chance to see old friends, track the global competition of the world's fastest machines via the Top500 list, discuss the latest hardware and software, and explore the applications of supercomputing to complex problems. To use a technically relevant analogy, my mean free path before encountering someone and stopping for conversation is often no more than ten meters. That is both wonderfully stimulating and, by week's end, exhausting.

SC11 Cray, Fernbach and Kennedy Awards

For the third year in a row, I had the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the IEEE Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which are being presented at SC11. These eponymously named awards recognize truly outstanding contributions to high-performance computing, in honor of two early leaders of our field. The Seymour Cray award recognizes individuals whose innovative contributions to high performance computing systems best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. In turn, the Sidney Fernbach award is given to for outstanding contribution in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches.

In addition to chairing the Cray and Fernbach award selection committee, I also had the privilege to be a member of the selection committee for the Ken Kennedy Award. The Kennedy award recognizes the contributions to programmability and productivity and community service and mentoring. The Kennedy award will also be presented at SC11.

Cray and Fernbach Award Presentation

I am looking forward to the Wednesday (November 16^th) session, were we will present all three awards and hear from the recipients. The 2011 Seymour Cray Award will be presented to Dr. Charles (Chuck) Seitz. Not only did Chuck and his colleagues stimulate a revolution in distributed memory supercomputing design with the Cosmic Cube, he developed the message passing techniques and hardware that have connected some of the world's fastest machines, including the Intel Paragon, ASCI Red and the Cray T3D/E. Chuck also led the team that founded Myricom, which developed the Myrinet interconnect.

I was equally pleased that we will present the 2011 Sidney Fernbach Award to Dr. Cleve Moler for his seminal contributions to linear algebra, mathematical software, and enabling tools for computational science. Cleve co-authored the widely used LINPACK and EISPACK scientific subroutine libraries, which are used a wide range of computational science applications. In addition, Cleve is the chief mathematician for MathWorks, the company he co-founded to commercialize MATLAB, perhaps the most widely used toolkit in all of science and engineering.

Finally, I am thrilled that the ACM-IEEE Ken Kennedy award will be presented to Professor Susan Graham, in recognition of her foundational compilation algorithms and programming tools, research and discipline leadership, and exceptional mentoring. Sue has made seminal contributions to programming software, as part of the UC-Berkeley UNIX project and other collaborations. If you have used a program performance profiler, such as gprof, you are the beneficiary of her work. As anyone who has worked with her knows, she has also mentored generations of students.

The three awards and the work of the recipients reflect the evolving interplay of technology, software, applications and algorithms in advancing high-performance computing. They also recognize intellectual leadership and mentoring of a new generation of high-performance computing talent. This interplay of technology and mentorship has continued to enable innovative scientific research and engineering practice, the vanguard of computational science and engineering.

Committee Acknowledgment

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the insights, perspectives and thoughtful evaluations of the Cray and Fernbach Awards Committee:

• Doug Burger, Microsoft
• Bill Dally, Stanford and NVIDIA
• Jim Demmel, University of California at Berkeley
• Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Bill Gropp, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Mary Hall, University of Utah
• Bob Lucas, USC Information Sciences Institute
• Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Paul Messina, Argonne National Laboratory
• Wolfgang Nagel, Technical University of Dresden
• Vivek Sarkar, Rice University
• Horst Simon, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Andy White, Los Alamos National Laboratory

On behalf of the committee, I also want to express my deepest thanks to Anne Marie Kelly from the IEEE Computer Society.

Broadband: Oxygen for a Digital World

Much has been written about what constitutes the baseline for acceptable broadband network speeds. The U.S. National Broadband Plan includes the following recommendations:

Every household and business location in America should have access to affordable broadband service with the following characteristics:

• Actual download speeds of at least 4 Mbps and actual upload speeds of at least 1 Mbps
• An acceptable quality of service for the most common interactive applications

The FCC should review and reset this target every four years.

The latter – reviewing and updating the target regularly – is essential. What was broadband in the past is woefully inadequate today. Not long ago, a 1200-baud dial modem was an object of technological envy, and a 64 Kbps ISDN connection was beyond the reach of mere mortals. Some of us even remember acoustic couplers. Today, they are all artifacts of our Internet history.

Supercomputing and Internet History

Today's Internet traces its origins to the early ARPANET and its progeny, notably NSFNET. Although both the ARPANET and the early NSFNET were continent spanning networks, the ARPANET backbone was based on 56 Kbps links. That remained the standard backbone speed even as NSFNET was deployed to interconnect the U.S. supercomputing centers.

I was at the University of Illinois when we began the NSFNET transition to a T1 (1.5 Mbps) backbone at NCSA. The iconic image of the early NSFNET T1 backbone, shown here, was the work of my former NCSA colleagues Donna Cox and Bob Patterson. The world changed quickly after that, with deployment of a new T3 (45 Mbps) NSFNET backbone, birth of the Mosaic web browser fueling the dot.com boom and rapid deployment of dark fiber.

By 2001, Charlie Catlett and I were negotiating access to 4 10 Gbps lambdas for the NSF TeraGrid, connecting NCSA in Illinois and SDSC in California. We had initially pursued options to light ten lambdas (i.e., 100 Gbps) because we were worried that 40 Gbps might not be enough to support large-scale data sharing and high fidelity scientific visualization. We were both right and wrong. The scientific data did grow, but the scientific applications took longer to develop.

At about the same time, when I picked the name TeraGrid for the distributed grid we were building to connect the NSF supercomputing centers, Ian Foster asked me if we might later regret using the "tera" prefix in a world were supercomputing performance changed so rapidly. I replied that I thought it would last long enough, and is has, far longer than I might have expected.

Though we are now deep into the petascale computing era, we are by no means in the terabit era. Although network backbone speeds have continued rise, data volumes and user expectations have risen even more rapidly, both in scientific computing and in business and consumer web services. We are now building petabyte islands and content distribution networks (CDNs) connected by relatively slow multi-gigabit networks. I keep wondering when multi-terabit networking will be commonplace.

A Devices and Services World

Inexpensive broadband access has made possible Internet searches, cloud services and always-connected PCs, tablets and smartphones. It has transformed our society, shifted our notions of commerce, shaken governments, and brought McLuhan's global village within reach.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that broadband networks, wired and wireless, are the oxygen that lets this world of devices and services breathe. However, the air remains perilously thin. Billions of devices are being added to the network, data volumes are rising exponentially, and expectations for anytime, anywhere access are growing worldwide. For many, digital inclusion remains a dream, rather than a reality.

If we are to meet burgeoning demand, extend the benefits of broadband services to all of the world's population, and enable a new generation of data-rich services and experiences, we need to approach the problem of broadband deployment in new ways.

We need both top down and bottom up strategies that encourage innovation and more rapid deployment of last mile connectivity. We must rethink our approaches to spectrum allocation and access, embracing more nimble and adaptive schemes. We must expand the capabilities of our backbone networks to meet demand.

Above all, we need to remember that the definition of broadband is ever shifting. We will always want more.