(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Exascale Day. Made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's celebration of Exascale Day. Dr. Mark Fernandez is here. He's the HPC technology officer for the Americas at Hewlett Packard enterprise. And he's a developer of the spaceborne computer, which we're going to talk about today. Mark, welcome. It's great to see you. >> Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So let's start with Exascale Day. It's on 10 18, of course, which is 10 to the power of 18. That's a one followed by 18 zeros. I joke all the time. It takes six commas to write out that number. (Mark laughing) But Mark, why don't we start? What's the significance of that number? >> So it's a very large number. And in general, we've been marking the progress of our computational capabilities in thousands. So exascale is a thousand times faster than where we are today. We're in an era today called the petaflop era which is 10 to the 15th. And prior to that, we were in the teraflop era, which is 10 to the 12th. I can kind of understand a 10 to the 12th and I kind of can discuss that with folks 'cause that's a trillion of something. And we know a lot of things that are in trillions, like our national debt, for example. (Dave laughing) But a billion, billion is an exascale and it will give us a thousand times more computational capability than we have in general today. >> Yeah, so when you think about going from terascale to petascale to exascale I mean, we're not talking about orders of magnitude, we're talking about a much more substantial improvement. And that's part of the reason why it's sort of takes so long to achieve these milestones. I mean, it kind of started back in the sixties and seventies and then... >> Yeah. >> We've been in the petascale now for more than a decade if I think I'm correct. >> Yeah, correct. We got there in 2007. And each of these increments is an extra comma, that's the way to remember it. So we want to add an extra comma and get to the exascale era. So yeah, like you say, we entered the current petaflop scale in 2007. Before that was the terascale, teraflop era and it was in 1997. So it took us 10 years to get that far, but it's taken us, going to take us 13 or 14 years to get to the next one. >> And we say flops, we're talking about floating point operations. And we're talking about the number of calculations that can be done in a second. I mean, talk about not being able to get your head around it, right? Is that's what talking about here? >> Correct scientists, engineers, weather forecasters, others use real numbers and real math. And that's how you want to rank those performance is based upon those real numbers times each other. And so that's why they're floating point numbers. >> When I think about supercomputers, I can't help but remember whom I consider the father of supercomputing Seymour Cray. Cray of course, is a company that Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired. And he was kind of an eclectic fellow. I mean, maybe that's unfair but he was an interesting dude. But very committed to his goal of really building the world's fastest computers. When you look at back on the industry, how do you think about its developments over the years? >> So one of the events that stands out in my mind is I was working for the Naval Research Lab outside Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. And we were doing weather modeling. And we got a Cray supercomputer. And there was a party when we were able to run a two week prediction in under two weeks. So the scientists and engineers had the math to solve the problem, but the current computers would take longer than just sitting and waiting and looking out the window to see what the weather was like. So when we can make a two week prediction in under two weeks, there was a celebration. And that was in the eighties, early nineties. And so now you see that we get weather predictions in eight hours, four hours and your morning folks will get you down to an hour. >> I mean, if you think about the history of super computing it's really striking to consider the challenges in the efforts as we were just talking about, I mean, decade plus to get to the next level. And you see this coming to fruition now, and we're saying exascale likely 2021. So what are some of the innovations in science, in medicine or other areas you mentioned weather that'll be introduced as exascale computing is ushered in, what should people expect? >> So we kind of alluded to one and weather affects everybody, everywhere. So we can get better weather predictions, which help everybody every morning before you get ready to go to work or travel or et cetera. And again, storm predictions, hurricane predictions, flood predictions, the forest fire predictions, those type things affect everybody, everyday. Those will get improved with exascale. In terms of medicine, we're able to take, excuse me, we're able to take genetic information and attempt to map that to more drugs quicker than we have in the past. So we'll be able to have drug discovery happening much faster with an exascale system out there. And to some extent that's happening now with COVID and all the work that we're doing now. And we realize that we're struggling with these current computers to find these solutions as fast as everyone wants them. And exascale computers will help us get there much faster in the future in terms of medicine. >> Well, and of course, as you apply machine intelligence and AI and machine learning to the applications running on these supercomputers, that just takes it to another level. I mean, people used to joke about you can't predict the weather and clearly we've seen that get much, much better. Now it's going to be interesting to see with climate change. That's another wildcard variable but I'm assuming the scientists are taking that into consideration. I mean, actually been pretty accurate about the impacts of climate change, haven't they? >> Yeah, absolutely. And the climate change models will get better with exascale computers too. And hopefully we'll be able to build a confidence in the public and the politicians in those results with these better, more powerful computers. >> Yeah let's hope so. Now let's talk about the spaceborne computer and your involvement in that project. Your original spaceborne computer it went up on a SpaceX reusable rocket. Destination of course, was the international space station. Okay, so what was the genesis of that project and what was the outcome? So we were approached by a long time customer NASA Ames. And NASA Ames says its mission is to model rocket launches and space missions and return to earth. And they had the foresight to realize that their supercomputers here on earth, could not do that mission when we got to Mars. And so they wanted to plan ahead and they said, "Can you take a small part of our supercomputer today and just prove that it can work in space? And if it can't figure out what we need to do to make it work, et cetera." So that's what we did. We took identical hardware, that's present at NASA Ames. We put it on a SpaceX rocket no special preparations for it in terms of hardware or anything of that sort, no special hardening, because we want to take the latest technology just before we head to Mars with us. I tell people you wouldn't want to get in the rocket headed to Mars with a flip phone. You want to take the latest iPhone, right? And all of the computers on board, current spacecrafts are about the 2007 era that we were talking about, in that era. So we want to take something new with us. We got the spaceone computer on board. It was installed in the ceiling because in space, there's no gravity. And you can put computers in the ceiling. And we immediately made a computer run. And we produced a trillion calculations a second which got us into the teraflop range. The first teraflop in space was pretty exciting. >> Well, that's awesome. I mean, so this is the ultimate example of edge computing. >> Yes. You mentioned you wanted to see if it could work and it sounds like it did. I mean, there was obviously a long elapse time to get it up and running 'cause you have to get it up there. But it sounds like once you did, it was up and running very quickly so it did work. But what were some of the challenges that you encountered maybe some of the learnings in terms of getting it up and running? >> So it's really fascinating. Astronauts are really cool people but they're not computer scientists, right? So they see a cord, they see a place to plug it in, they plug it in and of course we're watching live on the video and you plugged it in the wrong spot. So (laughs) Mr. Astronaut, can we back up and follow the procedure more carefully and get this thing plugged in carefully. They're not computer technicians used to installing a supercomputer. So we were able to get the system packaged for the shake, rattle and roll and G-forces of launch in the SpaceX. We were able to give astronaut instructions on how to install it and get it going. And we were able to operate it here from earth and get some pretty exciting results. >> So our supercomputers are so easy to install even an astronaut can do it. I don't know. >> That's right. (both laughing) Here on earth we have what we call a customer replaceable units. And we had to replace a component. And we looked at our instructions that are tried and true here on earth for average Joe, a customer to do that and realized without gravity, we're going to have to update this procedure. And so we renamed it an astronaut replaceable unit and it worked just fine. >> Yeah, you can't really send an SE out to space to fix it, can you? >> No sir. (Dave laughing) You have to have very careful instructions for these guys but they're great. It worked out wonderfully. >> That's awesome. Let's talk about spaceborne two. Now that's on schedule to go back to the ISS next year. What are you trying to accomplish this time? >> So in retrospect, spaceborne one was a proof of concept. Can we package it up to fit on SpaceX? Can we get the astronauts to install it? And can we operate it from earth? And if so, how long will it last? And do we get the right answers? 100% mission success on that. Now spaceborne two is, we're going to release it to the community of scientists, engineers and space explorers and say, "Hey this thing is rock solid, it's proven. Come use it to improve your edge computing." We'd like to preserve the network downlink bandwidth for all that imagery, all that genetic data, all that other data and process it on the edge as the whole world is moving to now. Don't move the data, let's compute at the edge and that's what we're going to do with spaceborne two. And so what's your expectation for how long the project is going to last? What does success look like in your mind? So spaceborne one was given a one year mission just to see if we could do it but the idea then was planted it's going to take about three years to get to Mars and back. So if you're successful, let's see if this computer can last three years. And so we're going up February 1st, if we go on schedule and we'll be up two to three years and as long as it works, we'll keep computing and computing on the edge. >> That's amazing. I mean, I feel like, when I started the industry, it was almost like there was a renaissance in supercomputing. You certainly had Cray and you had all these other companies, you remember thinking machines and convex spun out tried to do a mini supercomputer. And you had, really a lot of venture capital and then things got quiet for a while. I feel like now with all this big data and AI, we're seeing in all the use cases that you talked about, we're seeing another renaissance in supercomputing. I wonder if you could give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've got the generic like you said, floating point operations. We've now got specialized image processing processors and we have specialized graphics processing units, GPUs. So all of the scientists and engineers are looking at these specialized components and bringing them together to solve their missions at the edge faster than ever before. So there's heterogeneity of computing is coming together to make humanity a better place. And how are you going to celebrate Exascale Day? You got to special cocktail you going to shake up or what are you going to do? It's five o'clock somewhere on 10 18, and I'm a Parrothead fan. So I'll probably have a margarita. There you go all right. Well Mark, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on Exascale Day. Congratulations on your next project, the spaceborne two. Really appreciate you coming to theCUBE. Thank you very much I've enjoyed it. All right, you're really welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for thecUBE. We're celebrating Exascale Day. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

from around the globe it's thecube with digital coverage of exascale day made possible by hewlett packard enterprise welcome everyone to the cube celebration of exascale day ben bennett is here he's an hpc strategist and evangelist at hewlett-packard enterprise ben welcome good to see you good to see you too son hey well let's evangelize exascale a little bit you know what's exciting you uh in regards to the coming of exoskilled computing um well there's a couple of things really uh for me historically i've worked in super computing for many years and i have seen the coming of several milestones from you know actually i'm old enough to remember gigaflops uh coming through and teraflops and petaflops exascale is has been harder than many of us anticipated many years ago the sheer amount of technology that has been required to deliver machines of this performance has been has been us utterly staggering but the exascale era brings with it real solutions it gives us opportunities to do things that we've not been able to do before if you look at some of the the most powerful computers around today they've they've really helped with um the pandemic kovid but we're still you know orders of magnitude away from being able to design drugs in situ test them in memory and release them to the public you know we still have lots and lots of lab work to do and exascale machines are going to help with that we are going to be able to to do more um which ultimately will will aid humanity and they used to be called the grand challenges and i still think of them as that i still think of these challenges for scientists that exascale class machines will be able to help but also i'm a realist is that in 10 20 30 years time you know i should be able to look back at this hopefully touch wood look back at it and look at much faster machines and say do you remember the days when we thought exascale was faster yeah well you mentioned the pandemic and you know the present united states was tweeting this morning that he was upset that you know the the fda in the u.s is not allowing the the vaccine to proceed as fast as you'd like it in fact it the fda is loosening some of its uh restrictions and i wonder if you know high performance computing in part is helping with the simulations and maybe predicting because a lot of this is about probabilities um and concerns is is is that work that is going on today or are you saying that that exascale actually you know would be what we need to accelerate that what's the role of hpc that you see today in regards to sort of solving for that vaccine and any other sort of pandemic related drugs so so first a disclaimer i am not a geneticist i am not a biochemist um my son is he tries to explain it to me and it tends to go in one ear and out the other um um i just merely build the machines he uses so we're sort of even on that front um if you read if you had read the press there was a lot of people offering up systems and computational resources for scientists a lot of the work that has been done understanding the mechanisms of covid19 um have been you know uncovered by the use of very very powerful computers would exascale have helped well clearly the faster the computers the more simulations we can do i think if you look back historically no vaccine has come to fruition as fast ever under modern rules okay admittedly the first vaccine was you know edward jenner sat quietly um you know smearing a few people and hoping it worked um i think we're slightly beyond that the fda has rules and regulations for a reason and we you don't have to go back far in our history to understand the nature of uh drugs that work for 99 of the population you know and i think exascale widely available exoscale and much faster computers are going to assist with that imagine having a genetic map of very large numbers of people on the earth and being able to test your drug against that breadth of person and you know that 99 of the time it works fine under fda rules you could never sell it you could never do that but if you're confident in your testing if you can demonstrate that you can keep the one percent away for whom that drug doesn't work bingo you now have a drug for the majority of the people and so many drugs that have so many benefits are not released and drugs are expensive because they fail at the last few moments you know the more testing you can do the more testing in memory the better it's going to be for everybody uh personally are we at a point where we still need human trials yes do we still need due diligence yes um we're not there yet exascale is you know it's coming it's not there yet yeah well to your point the faster the computer the more simulations and the higher the the chance that we're actually going to going to going to get it right and maybe compress that time to market but talk about some of the problems that you're working on uh and and the challenges for you know for example with the uk government and maybe maybe others that you can you can share with us help us understand kind of what you're hoping to accomplish so um within the united kingdom there was a report published um for the um for the uk research institute i think it's the uk research institute it might be epsrc however it's the body of people responsible for funding um science and there was a case a science case done for exascale i'm not a scientist um a lot of the work that was in this documentation said that a number of things that can be done today aren't good enough that we need to look further out we need to look at machines that will do much more there's been a program funded called asimov and this is a sort of a commercial problem that the uk government is working with rolls royce and they're trying to research how you build a full engine model and by full engine model i mean one that takes into account both the flow of gases through it and how those flow of gases and temperatures change the physical dynamics of the engine and of course as you change the physical dynamics of the engine you change the flow so you need a closely coupled model as air travel becomes more and more under the microscope we need to make sure that the air travel we do is as efficient as possible and currently there aren't supercomputers that have the performance one of the things i'm going to be doing as part of this sequence of conversations is i'm going to be having an in detailed uh sorry an in-depth but it will be very detailed an in-depth conversation with professor mark parsons from the edinburgh parallel computing center he's the director there and the dean of research at edinburgh university and i'm going to be talking to him about the azimoth program and and mark's experience as the person responsible for looking at exascale within the uk to try and determine what are the sort of science problems that we can solve as we move into the exoscale era and what that means for humanity what are the benefits for humans yeah and that's what i wanted to ask you about the the rolls-royce example that you gave it wasn't i if i understood it wasn't so much safety as it was you said efficiency and so that's that's what fuel consumption um it's it's partly fuel consumption it is of course safety there is a um there is a very specific test called an extreme event or the fan blade off what happens is they build an engine and they put it in a cowling and then they run the engine at full speed and then they literally explode uh they fire off a little explosive and they fire a fan belt uh a fan blade off to make sure that it doesn't go through the cowling and the reason they do that is there has been in the past uh a uh a failure of a fan blade and it came through the cowling and came into the aircraft depressurized the aircraft i think somebody was killed as a result of that and the aircraft went down i don't think it was a total loss one death being one too many but as a result you now have to build a jet engine instrument it balance the blades put an explosive in it and then blow the fan blade off now you only really want to do that once it's like car crash testing you want to build a model of the car you want to demonstrate with the dummy that it is safe you don't want to have to build lots of cars and keep going back to the drawing board so you do it in computers memory right we're okay with cars we have computational power to resolve to the level to determine whether or not the accident would hurt a human being still a long way to go to make them more efficient uh new materials how you can get away with lighter structures but we haven't got there with aircraft yet i mean we can build a simulation and we can do that and we can be pretty sure we're right um we still need to build an engine which costs in excess of 10 million dollars and blow the fan blade off it so okay so you're talking about some pretty complex simulations obviously what are some of the the barriers and and the breakthroughs that are kind of required you know to to do some of these things that you're talking about that exascale is going to enable i mean presumably there are obviously technical barriers but maybe you can shed some light on that well some of them are very prosaic so for example power exoscale machines consume a lot of power um so you have to be able to design systems that consume less power and that goes into making sure they're cooled efficiently if you use water can you reuse the water i mean the if you take a laptop and sit it on your lap and you type away for four hours you'll notice it gets quite warm um an exascale computer is going to generate a lot more heat several megawatts actually um and it sounds prosaic but it's actually very important to people you've got to make sure that the systems can be cooled and that we can power them yeah so there's that another issue is the software the software models how do you take a software model and distribute the data over many tens of thousands of nodes how do you do that efficiently if you look at you know gigaflop machines they had hundreds of nodes and each node had effectively a processor a core a thread of application we're looking at many many tens of thousands of nodes cores parallel threads running how do you make that efficient so is the software ready i think the majority of people will tell you that it's the software that's the problem not the hardware of course my friends in hardware would tell you ah software is easy it's the hardware that's the problem i think for the universities and the users the challenge is going to be the software i think um it's going to have to evolve you you're just you want to look at your machine and you just want to be able to dump work onto it easily we're not there yet not by a long stretch of the imagination yeah consequently you know we one of the things that we're doing is that we have a lot of centers of excellence is we will provide well i hate say the word provide we we sell super computers and once the machine has gone in we work very closely with the establishments create centers of excellence to get the best out of the machines to improve the software um and if a machine's expensive you want to get the most out of it that you can you don't just want to run a synthetic benchmark and say look i'm the fastest supercomputer on the planet you know your users who want access to it are the people that really decide how useful it is and the work they get out of it yeah the economics is definitely a factor in fact the fastest supercomputer in the planet but you can't if you can't afford to use it what good is it uh you mentioned power uh and then the flip side of that coin is of course cooling you can reduce the power consumption but but how challenging is it to cool these systems um it's an engineering problem yeah we we have you know uh data centers in iceland where it gets um you know it doesn't get too warm we have a big air cooled data center in in the united kingdom where it never gets above 30 degrees centigrade so if you put in water at 40 degrees centigrade and it comes out at 50 degrees centigrade you can cool it by just pumping it round the air you know just putting it outside the building because the building will you know never gets above 30 so it'll easily drop it back to 40 to enable you to put it back into the machine um right other ways to do it um you know is to take the heat and use it commercially there's a there's a lovely story of they take the hot water out of the supercomputer in the nordics um and then they pump it into a brewery to keep the mash tuns warm you know that's that's the sort of engineering i can get behind yeah indeed that's a great application talk a little bit more about your conversation with professor parsons maybe we could double click into that what are some of the things that you're going to you're going to probe there what are you hoping to learn so i think some of the things that that are going to be interesting to uncover is just the breadth of science that can be uh that could take advantage of exascale you know there are there are many things going on that uh that people hear about you know we people are interested in um you know the nobel prize they might have no idea what it means but the nobel prize for physics was awarded um to do with research into black holes you know fascinating and truly insightful physics um could it benefit from exascale i have no idea uh i i really don't um you know one of the most profound pieces of knowledge in in the last few hundred years has been the theory of relativity you know an austrian patent clerk wrote e equals m c squared on the back of an envelope and and voila i i don't believe any form of exascale computing would have helped him get there any faster right that's maybe flippant but i think the point is is that there are areas in terms of weather prediction climate prediction drug discovery um material knowledge engineering uh problems that are going to be unlocked with the use of exascale class systems we are going to be able to provide more tools more insight [Music] and that's the purpose of computing you know it's not that it's not the data that that comes out and it's the insight we get from it yeah i often say data is plentiful insights are not um ben you're a bit of an industry historian so i've got to ask you you mentioned you mentioned mentioned gigaflop gigaflops before which i think goes back to the early 1970s uh but the history actually the 80s is it the 80s okay well the history of computing goes back even before that you know yes i thought i thought seymour cray was you know kind of father of super computing but perhaps you have another point of view as to the origination of high performance computing [Music] oh yes this is um this is this is one for all my colleagues globally um you know arguably he says getting ready to be attacked from all sides arguably you know um computing uh the parallel work and the research done during the war by alan turing is the father of high performance computing i think one of the problems we have is that so much of that work was classified so much of that work was kept away from commercial people that commercial computing evolved without that knowledge i uh i have done in in in a previous life i have done some work for the british science museum and i have had the great pleasure in walking through the the british science museum archives um to look at how computing has evolved from things like the the pascaline from blaise pascal you know napier's bones the babbage's machines uh to to look all the way through the analog machines you know what conrad zeus was doing on a desktop um i think i think what's important is it doesn't matter where you are is that it is the problem that drives the technology and it's having the problems that requires the you know the human race to look at solutions and be these kicks started by you know the terrible problem that the us has with its nuclear stockpile stewardship now you've invented them how do you keep them safe originally done through the ascii program that's driven a lot of computational advances ultimately it's our quest for knowledge that drives these machines and i think as long as we are interested as long as we want to find things out there will always be advances in computing to meet that need yeah and you know it was a great conversation uh you're a brilliant guest i i love this this this talk and uh and of course as the saying goes success has many fathers so there's probably a few polish mathematicians that would stake a claim in the uh the original enigma project as well i think i think they drove the algorithm i think the problem is is that the work of tommy flowers is the person who took the algorithms and the work that um that was being done and actually had to build the poor machine he's the guy that actually had to sit there and go how do i turn this into a machine that does that and and so you know people always remember touring very few people remember tommy flowers who actually had to turn the great work um into a working machine yeah super computer team sport well ben it's great to have you on thanks so much for your perspectives best of luck with your conversation with professor parsons we'll be looking forward to that and uh and thanks so much for coming on thecube a complete pleasure thank you and thank you everybody for watching this is dave vellante we're celebrating exascale day you're watching the cube [Music]