Johnny von Neumann is a name often spoken with considerable reverence in scientific circles. The epitomy of prodigy and polymath – and even those words fail to do him justice – von Neumann had the kind of mind that made even the world’s most brilliant stare in slack jawed awe. In idle musings on new topics, he often offered insights that would have been the crowning achievement and life’s work of other, lesser talents.
Indeed, based on his seminal contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, statistics, and yes, computing, one can make a rather compelling case that Johnny may well have been the smartest human being on the planet during his lifetime. (Well, assuming he wasn’t a Martian, as Leo Szilard sometimes joked about the group of Hungarian expats.) As Edward Teller once put it, “von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.”
The “von Neumann” Design
Given von Neumann’s involvement in the Manhattan Project and its associated computing needs, as well his deep familiarity with the work of Gödel and Turing, it is no surprise that he turned his attention to digital computing, writing the 101-page, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” while commuting by train from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) to Los Alamos. Released on June 30th, 1945, the draft contained the first published description of the stored-program concept, now often called a von Neumann architecture, where both instructions and data were contained in the same memory, central arithmetic and control units coordinated instruction execution, and input/output devices serviced the computing infrastructure. It is no exaggeration to say the draft report transformed and codified modern digital computing.
The report originated from von Neumann’s role as a consultant to the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) design, and on its publication, the report generated some controversy. The EDVAC team, notably Mauchly and Eckert, felt von Neumann had simply summarized their design without listing them as authors, and via publication, prevented patents on the stored program ideas. (In March 1946, both Eckert and Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania over intellectual property disputes and formed the company that developed UNIVAC.)
Given his prodigious talent and contributions in other areas, one cannot help but believe that von Neumann generalized and codified several ideas he heard during the EDVAC conversations, but we are unlikely to ever know for sure. Regardless of the controversy, von Neumann’s report had a major influence on computer design and construction for the next decade, when each machine was a bespoke design.
Illinois Innovations
My first intellectual home, the University of Illinois, built two machines based on von Neumann’s IAS design, driven by Illinois faculty who were previously associated with the IAS. The first, ORDVAC, was delivered to the U.S Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1951. As part of that contract, Illinois was given funds to build a second copy in 1952, which became ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), the first computer built and owned entirely by a U.S. educational institution.
It was the beginning of a long, illustrious, and continuing history of advanced computing innovation at Illinois, with the ILLIAC II (ECL, core memory, and pipelined operations), ILLIAC III (fine-grained SIMD pattern matching), ILLIAC IV (parallel processing), and Cedar (hierarchical shared memory) computing systems, as well as PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) computer-aided instruction, the Eudora e-mail client, and the Mosaic web browser, itself the progeny of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) ecosystem.
As an aside, just a few years before I arrived, the four color theorem, unresolved for nearly one hundred years, had been proven by Illinois mathematicians Appel and Haken, using a theoretical framework to test a provably finite number of cases by computer. For many years, mail from the University of Illinois was embossed with the simple phrase “Four colors suffice.” I loved that quiet and understated academic trash talking, a way of communicating, as Dizzy Dean once did, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.”
Personal Reflections
I have written about several of these Illinois experiences over the years and how they have shaped my professional life, including the formation of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), application of high-performance computing ideas to energy efficient cloud data center design while at Microsoft, and my work as an academic leader:
- Luck Is a Fickle Friend (lessons from ILLIAC IV)
- Eudora, You Got the Love? (why passion matters)
- Mind to Mind: Building Innovation (reflections on PLATO and human empowerment)
- NCSA@30: Reflections on the Revolution (musings on rapid technological change)
- Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens (interdisciplinary collaboration insights)
- The Magic Behind the Curtain: Hardware and Software (the joy of teaching computing)
I have said elsewhere, and I will say again here, that I went to Illinois as a young assistant professor because it was as close to heaven as a young high-performance computing researcher could find here on Earth. I was not disappointed! I loved my time at Illinois because of the incredible people (Bardeen, Bitzer, Cox, Holonyak, Kuck, Lawrie, Smarr, Robertson, Slotnick, and so many others) and their repeated proof-by-demonstration that one should not just dream about the future, but that one can and must build it! (See Predicting Potentialities, Reifying Futures.)
I am proud to have had a role in adding a few small pieces to that rich history via my own work on distributed memory parallel computing, leadership of the Illinois’ Department of Computer Science, recruitment of new faculty, construction of Siebel Center, and the conception, design, and construction of the NSF TeraGrid (later XSEDE) while NCSA director. In between, we also had some fun, playing with gigabit testbeds and I-WIRE (thanks, Charlie Catlett), building parallel computing clusters from Sony PlayStations (See the New York Times article), and visualizing web traffic in the CAVE, when NCSA’s webserver was the busiest in the world.
Coda
At a time when some question our continuing will and ability to mount big, audacious initiatives, it is worth pausing to draw a few intellectual lessons from the pioneers of digital computing, and remember the transformative power of dedicated individuals and compelling ideas. (See On the Etiology of Heroes and That’s One Small Step for {a} Man.) It has always been important to imagine the future, not as a dream, but as reality to be realized.
As the legendary Chicago architect, Daniel Burnham remarked,
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens’ blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.
The logical diagram of the ”von Neumann” architecture has lived on and continued to transform our world. Today’s supercomputers, smartphones, and the Internet of Things (IoT) all rely on variants of the von Neumann idea.
Yet, like all great ideas, the “von Neumann” architecture has its limitations. (See Nothing Lasts Forever.) The bandwidth and latency bottlenecks of the separated execution and storage units continue to drive architectural and technological innovation, in the pursuit of higher performance via end-to-end co-design. (See Advanced Computing: Integrative Thinking for the Future.) The end of Dennard scaling has led to renewed focus on parallelism, architectural specialization, and energy efficiency. If he were alive today, I am confident Johnny would still be excited about computing and would be deeply involved in work on quantum computing and approximate computations.
Ask the deepest questions. Run with the big dogs. The company, the journey, and the destinations all matter. It has always been and always will be where the action is. On that, Johnny would wholeheartedly agree!
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