PrefaceIntroduction – The History of NowApproachUniversity Computing Environments – early 1980sNetwork Access 1984 – 1986 LAN and WAN University InfrastructuresEarly Reports of the Problem – Discipline Specific Reports and Recommendations Concerning Academic Access to SupercomputingWidespread Recognition - The Famine of Supercomputers in American UniversitiesUnsolicited Proposals to Problem and the NSF ResponseBringing the Future Closer:The Rise of the National Academic Supercomputer CentersA Wikipedia-like DraftKevin WalshUCSD CSE 291December 6, 2006ContentsPrefaceApproachUniversity Computing Environments Network Access 1984 – 1986 LAN and WAN University InfrastructuresWidespread Recognition - The Famine of Supercomputers in American UniversitiesUnsolicited Proposals to Problem and the NSF ResponseError: Reference source not foundPrefaceMy subject is the rise of the national academic supercomputer centers in the United States during the early 1980s. I have chosen 1984 as theleading edge of the rise, and 1988, as my end of chapter marker, the year the first Supercomputing Conference, SC88 was held, a conference that has become the annual gathering for the high performance computing community.1 Each year there are several awards to recognize achievements bearing the names pioneers in modern computing, including Seymour Cray and Gordon Bell, one the presenters in the class this quarter. The history of academic supercomputing is as much about science and community, as it is about the computing and communications technology that provided the infrastructure for an unprecedented scale of collaboration and scientific knowledge creation. This community could not have formed without the concurrent creationof the NSFnet, a nation wide research network, which was initially implemented to link the supercomputer centers. The NSFnet marked the beginning of a revolution in open information access, because it was the true harbinger of national end-to-end data communications through an infrastructure that has become today’s Internet. Although the pace of global interconnectedness has changed how we think about time and space, the historical record indicates that the flatteningof the world was bootstrapped by the need for academic scientists to share distributed high performance computing resources.2This is a hybrid work, which is written as a mix of two genres; one bearing some resemblance to a history paper, and the second that of aWikpedia entry. Like a Wikipedia entry, it is a work in progress. In the style of Wikipedia, if you don’t like a section, return to the top level Contents, and make another choice after you…..Return to ContentsIn the process of carrying out the research for this work, I have assembled an abundance of material that is far too broad and deep to treat as comprehensively as the events and their consequences deserve. Therefore this work is an initiation.I am thankful to several people who have provided me with key committee documents and proposals that do not exist in libraries, but have been preserved by the actual participants who served on the committees and proposal teams. They were kind enough to share their personal copies with me. I am also grateful to key participants inthe creation of the national supercomputer centers who generously accommodated my deadlines and schedule in order to grant my requests for interviews, as well as responding to questions by email. My appreciation currently includes Sid Karin, Irene Lombardo, Chris Jordan, Amit Chourasia, Jim D’Aoust, Reagan Moore, Jim Madden, Larry Smarr, and Wayne Pfeiffer. Return to ContentsIntroduction – The History of Now9:01 A.M. December 23, 200? – Los Angeles, CaliforniaA 7.7 magnitude earthquake has just occurred in Southern California, centered 100 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Freeway overpasses have collapsed at Highway 10 over Highway 91 near Riverside, and are severely damaged over Highway 605 near West Covina. Two runways at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) exhibit diagonal cracks greater that ½ inch wide, with lengths that span over 100 feet. Forty-three commercial aircraft are in the airspace within 350 miles of LAX, expecting to land. Over 20 aircraft are in taxi positions on the ground, waiting to take off. Over 2 million people are on the roadways in cars, buses, and trucks. Cell phone transmission access points are saturated with thousands of calls from motorists who can go nowhere other that the very coordinates that the earth’s crust had just shifted by 24 centimeters.Where would the next shocks be felt? Which way would seismic wavesof aftershocks go? Before the first show had propagated to where it was felt in Irvine, just as Disneyland was opening for the day, answers to these questions were being calculated within an supercomputing infrastructure that includes resources at USC, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, Argonne National Lab, and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Terrestrial sensor nets are continuously transmitting seismic measurements through this infrastructure into a global parallel file system, which appears as common virtual hard disk, a data space that SDSC and NCSA can concurrently read from and write to over multiple 10-gigabit network connections. From within this data space, the incoming earthquake measurements are being concurrently comparedto a library of past measurements, seismic wave models, and earthquake hazard maps. One more element is necessary in order to make meaning from this rush of composite data – visualization – made possible by specialized computers at ANL, which can rapidly render and display terabyte data sets, as they are being created by the seismic instrumentation in vivo.3Source: SDSC Visualization Services; Terashake 2.2 visualizion by Amit ChourasiaWhat is portrayed here is not science fiction, but a description of demonstrated capabilities of a high performance-computing infrastructure that can provide measurement-based answers concerning the direction, duration and amplitude of seismic waves, andreflected seismic waves that accompany earthquakes and their aftershocks. The sooner this information is available, and in a visual format that can be understood by civil authorities and first responders, the sooner resources can be directed to locations where threats to
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