June 9, 2008

A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Military Supercomputer Sets Record
2. Ask Not What Graduates Can Do For the Nation
3. Federal Diary: The Pentagon's Latest Recruits: Professors 
4. A Smaller Carbon Footprint?
5. Telework Negotiations Break Down Between Union and GSA 

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

New York Times

By John Markoff

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop -- one thousand trillion calculations per second -- has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time -- compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers -- petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

"This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world's fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics."

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system's hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

"We've proved some skeptics wrong," said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before."

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

"If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you're driving will benefit from this," said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world's fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

"It's a sign that we are maintaining our position," said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that "the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines."

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. "You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader," said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

Ask Not What Graduates Can Do For the Nation

It's high school graduation time and the halls are ringing with John F. Kennedy's exhortation to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Public service has been prominent in the presidential campaign narratives, and should be a focus at graduations. But such rhetoric is not quite enough to launch this generation into a lifetime of service.

Just as young Americans have redefined social networking through Facebook, they have changed the basic meaning of public service. It no longer denotes a 30-year career in government, but a kaleidoscope of engagement that covers everything from voting to military service.

Young Americans sort through these new options based on the chance they'll make a difference on a specific cause, not with an innate sense of civic duty. They have set records in volunteering for their country and are highly aware of issues such as Darfur, global warming, and the latest international disaster.

Whether they participate in public service as occasional volunteers or as full-time employees, they want meaningful assignments, the chance to learn new skills, and the opportunity to help people.

Young Americans believe that public service is something they can do anywhere at any time. They seem to feel just as engaged in great causes by wearing cancer bracelets, shopping at Whole Foods, and buying clothes as part of Project Red, as they do in voting, writing letters to Congress, and giving a few dollars to a candidate.

Government jobs have little appeal as a path to service for students about to graduate. And government is its own worst enemy here. Young Americans rightly view the government hiring process as slow and confusing, their pay tied more to time on the job than performance, and the chance to make a difference limited by a persistent lack of resources. They also worry that they cannot make a difference in mind-numbing bureaucracies.

So how should commencement speakers approach their speeches given this?

For starters, they should be careful about invoking Kennedy in an era of $4-a-gallon gasoline and stagflation. With the student loan crisis looming, why shouldn't young Americans wonder whether their country can do for them what it did for Bear Stearns and wealthy farmers? Young graduates have shown they are willing to sacrifice, but need help.

Speakers should promise instead to make it easier for young Americans to solve the big problems facing the world. Stop lecturing graduates about their responsibilities to society. They get it.

Instead, address the parents, teachers, and civic leaders. Help communities understand their responsibilities to young Americans, not vice versa.

Tell these leaders it's important to make time available - during work - to young Americans for volunteering. Tell them to restore civics to the curriculum. Even tell them to create new campaign finance incentives for online fundraising. But most of all, tell them to support the needed expansion of government programs that do a good job, such as Americorps. Tell them to support the quadrupling Americorps and an increase in its tuition benefit.

Congress actually passed the prototype of a new tuition benefit last month when it created a new GI Bill of Rights. Under the $52 billion program, three-year veterans can earn up to full tuition at any pubic university in their state.

Why not make a similar program available to Americorps members? Let them earn a year of full tuition in return for the year that they serve.

For a fraction of the cost of the new "Yellow Ribbon" GI bill, a larger Americorps would send a clear message that public service is not only conceivable, but doable. It would also help ease the student loan crisis without a heavy federal investment in new subsidies.

Moreover, new research strongly suggests that Americorps members are much more likely than their peers to increase their volunteering after they leave the program. And they are more likely to take public service jobs such as teaching. Why not tap into that?

Given the state of the economy, speakers might rephrase Kennedy as follows: "Ask what you can do for your nation, and we will ask what the nation can do about Darfur, global warming, health insurance, an affordable college education, and a long overdue expansion in Americorps." Now that's worthy of a standing ovation.

The Pentagon's Latest Recruits: Professors

Military power requires brainpower, and the Defense Department is moving to engage a new generation of scientists and engineers to conduct research that may pay off in technological breakthroughs for the nation's military.

The department last week announced the selection of six university professors who will form the first class of the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows Program.

The professors will receive grants of up to $600,000 per year for up to five years to engage in basic research -- essentially a bet by the Pentagon that they will make a discovery that proves vital to maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military.

"We do think great discoveries are likely," said William S. Rees Jr., the deputy undersecretary of defense for laboratories and basic sciences.

There was no shortage of applicants -- more than 350 -- for the fellowships, perhaps because each fellow would be eligible for up to $3 million of grants. The field was cut to 20, and those applicants were asked to provide more details about their research plans and to meet with a panel of experts for interviews.

"I really didn't know what to expect," Rees said, adding that, as the proposals were evaluated, "my knees were really staggered by the quality."

In the end, six fellows were selected. Their research will be unclassified, but they will undergo background checks for a security clearance because the Pentagon wants to take them on tours of Defense Department laboratories, invite them to agency meetings and ask them to share their insights and knowledge with the department's military and civilian leaders.

The Defense Department hopes that, over time, as more classes of fellows are selected, the grants will help forge relationships with some of the best minds in the country and enable the Pentagon to recruit them for advisory groups and study commissions.

Carey E. Priebe, a professor in the applied mathematics and statistics department at Johns Hopkins University, is one of the fellows in the inaugural class. In nominating him for the fellowship, William R. Brody, the president of Johns Hopkins, said Priebe's research "has tremendous potential to revolutionize the future of data analysis, for national security and other important applications."

Priebe hopes to discover a way to make predictions from statistics calculated from multiple, disparate types of information, rather than the current practice of drawing inferences from a homogeneous source of information.

For example, Priebe's idea would make it possible for a mathematical model and a computer program to take information from scientific journals and link it to biographical information of individual researchers. For each researcher, the model would define his or her social network by tracking the scientific conferences they attend and whether their associates take jobs in labs with no apparent relation to their previous jobs.

The model, in theory, would piece together information not available in scientific journals and allow the Defense Department to predict innovations and avoid being technologically surprised by another nation or adversary. It also could help the department cut across research boundaries and connect a scientist who has a problem to solve with a scientist in a seemingly unrelated field who has a potential solution.

"One of the big problems that the Defense Department has, as does The Washington Post, Google and everyone else, is trying to understand all the stuff that is out there," Priebe said.

Priebe worked for Navy research labs for nine years before joining Johns Hopkins in 1994. He has worked on his idea for the past decade and said the Defense Department grant will give him the opportunity to test his concepts and, hopefully, deliver a blockbuster discovery.

The other fellows are Diana L. Huffaker of the University of California at Los Angeles, Stephen L. Mayo of the California Institute of Technology, Chad A. Mirkin of Northwestern University, Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham of Boston University and Susan Trolier-McKinstry of Pennsylvania State University.

Their research will explore nanomaterials, proteins, acoustic communications, sensors and related subjects.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has urged the department to make basic research a priority and asked Congress this year for extra funding. Although such research usually does not start out with any commercial purpose in mind, it can produce information or knowledge that leads to new technology or weapons, such as the stealth aircraft.

Rees, who oversees the Defense Department's basic research portfolio, said basic research, by its nature, is high-risk but worth the investment.

"Any one of the six, if they were to be successful, would make revolutionary discoveries about how we think about science," he said.

A Smaller Carbon Footprint?