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TESTIMONY BY
DR. MALVIN H. KALOS
DIRECTOR, CORNELL THEORY CENTER
TO THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,
AND SPACE
HEARINGS ON S. 272, THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE
COMPUTING ACT OF 1991
TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 1991
Mr. Chairman, it is a privilege to be invited to comment on the "High
Performance Computing Act of 1991" in the company of such a
distinguished group of representatives of government, industry, and
academia.
I am Malvin H. Kalos, Director of the Cornell Theory Center, and a
professor of physics at Cornell University. The Theory Center is an
interdisciplinary research unit of Cornell University, dedicated to the
advancement and exploitation of high performance computing and
networking for science, engineering, and industrial productivity. As
you know, the Theory Center is one of the National Supercomputer
Centers supported by the National Science Foundation. The Center
also receives support from the State of New York, and from industry.
My career spans 40 years of work with computers as a tool in
physics and engineering. I have worked in universities, industry, and
as a consultant to the Los Alamos, Livermore, and Oak Ridge national
laboratories in research devoted to the application of high
performance computing to further their missions.
We are witnessing a profound transformation of our scientific and
engineering cultures brought about by the advent and adoption of
high-performance computing and communications as part of our
technological society. The changes, some of which we see now, some
of which we easily surmise, and some of which we can only guess at,
have had and will continue to have wide-reaching benefits. Our
economic well-being and the quality of our lives will be
immeasurably improved. I salute the foresight and leadership of the
authors and cosponsors of this Bill, and the Administration. Senator
Gore, Congressmen Hollings and Brown, and the President all
understand the deep and positive implications for our future. We are
also grateful for the support of Congressmen Boehlert and McHugh
whose backing of our efforts at Cornell and for the entire program
has been very strong.
The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr.
Bromley, has done essential work in translating the ideas into
effective policy. The Federal Coordinating Council for Science,
Engineering, and Technology (FCCSET) has, for the first time, brought
unity into the Federal approach to high-performance computing. This
is a well designed, well integrated program that shows good balance
between the need to exploit advancing supercomputing technology,
the need for very high performance networking, and the need to
bring these new tools to the widest possible community through
research and education.
I will begin with some historical and philosophical remarks about
science, using the history of physics, which I know best. Science is
not a dry collection of disconnected facts, however interesting. The
essence of science is the dynamic network of interconnections
between facts. For a scientist, making a connection never perceived
before can be the highlight of a career; the more distant the
connection, the more it is valued. Our aim is to connect all we know
in a seamless web of understanding. Historically, the greatest
contribution of the greatest scientists have been such connections:
Newton's between the fall of an apple and the motion of the Moon
and planets; Maxwell's between the phenomena of electricity,
magnetism, and the propagation of light; Einstein's leap of
understanding connecting quanta of light and the photoelectric effect.
These connections must be, to the greatest extent possible,
mathematical and quantitative, not merely verbal or qualitative.
Making these connections in a quantitative way remains at the heart
of pure science today, but it has become harder as we try to probe
into more and more complex phenomena, phenomena that cannot be
analyzed by the mathematical tools at our disposal. There are many
important examples in science that shed light on this paradigm.
Chemistry is one of our most important sciences, one that contributes
enormously to our grasp of the physical world and one whose
applications lie at the core of our understanding of materials we use,
wear, and eat, and of our health. The fundamental understanding of
chemistry lies in quantum mechanics and electricity, well understood
since the 1930s. Yet the translation of that scientific understanding
into quantitative knowledge about chemical materials and processes-
- polymers, chemical catalysis, drugs both harmful and healing, is
very far from complete. Quite properly, chemistry is still largely an
experimental science. But the power of modern supercomputers is
transforming the face of chemistry at every level. We are coming to
understand how electrons cooperate to bind atoms into molecules,
molecules into larger structures, and to elucidate their structural,
dynamic, and biological effects. However, extraordinary numerical
precision, which can only be attained by very powerful
supercomputers, is required for this vital work.
Many other areas of science involve this kind of systematic
connection among different phenomena at different scales of length
or energy, including biology and medicine, the physics of materials,
and astrophysics.
The role of computation in linking disparate scientific fields is not a
contemporary development. The early evolution of modem
computers was dominated in the 1940s and 1950s by John von
Neumann, who was also a great mathematician. He designed
computers so that the very difficult questions that underlie such
scientific and engineering problems as fluid flow could be explored
and understood. Only later was it recognized that computers were
also important business tools. The essential role of computers in
science and engineering were well appreciated by many groups in
the United States, including the national laboratories, and their use
contributed very much to the development of nuclear weapons,
fusion technology, and the design of aircraft.
The use of computers in academic science and engineering evolved
more slowly, partly because of the failure of many to see the
possibilities, partly because the policies of the Federal government at
the time discouraged scientists from participating fully. My own
career was impacted negatively by these policies. It was the
leadership of a few scientists, notably Dr. Kenneth Wilson, who
created the modern climate of respect for the accomplishments and
possibilities of computational science in the future of our country.
The constructive contributions of the Congress and the National
Science Foundation in creating the National Supercomputer Centers
are noteworthy. That creation was, in a profound sense, the mark of
the entry by the mainstream of American research into the era of
computational science at the heart of science
and engineering.
It is also important to note that computational science is now an
essential tool in experimental science as it is currently practised. The
most advanced scientific instruments, optical and radio telescopes,
particle accelerators, and computers themselves are studied,
designed, optimized, and verified with computer simulation. Data
collection is usually automated with the help of computers, and the
reduction to comprehensible data sets and pictures may involve
enormous computations. Exchange of large data sets and the
cooperative work in understanding them will require very large
computations and very heavy use of future high capacity data
networks. Finally, in many cases, even reduced data are
incomprehensible except when studied in the light of complex
theories that can be understood only by simulation.
Now the entire scientific and engineering community of the country
has the opportunity to exploit these new tools. Many researchers are.
Important new scientific discoveries are being made. New ideas and
connections are seen everywhere. More important, students and
young scientists, who are always the very heart of any important
scientific change, are involved. They are coming to understand the
techniques, the promise, and the limitations of computational science.
Their knowledge and its applications are the most important
products of our efforts, and they will carry the message to the rest of
our society and to the future. It is they who will have the most direct
impact upon industry in the United States.
The science made possible throughout the nation by the resources of
the Theory Center spans all scales of length and energy from the
galactic through the planetary through the earth's crust, the behavior
of man-made structures, of materials at the microscopic level, to the
physics of elementary particles. From another perspective, it spans
the traditional disciplines of physics, chemistry, mathematics,
biology, medicine, all fields of engineering, and agriculture and
veterinary medicine.
Although I describe research at or made possible by the Theory
Center, the other National Centers, at San Diego, Champaign-Urbana,
and at Pittsburgh, can easily list an equally impressive set of
accomplishments in pure and multidisciplinary science.
It is perhaps unfair to cite a few at the expense of so many others,
but the work of Stuart Shapiro and Saul Teukolsky on fluids and
fields in general relativity is outstanding and has been recognized by
a significant prize, the Forefronts of Large-Scale Computation Award.
Their research comprises both the development of mathematical and
numerical methods for the exploration of astrophysical and
cosmological phenomena and the use of these methods to develop
quantitative understanding of the formation of black holes and the
characteristics of gravitational radiation.
John Dawson of UCLA uses the Theory Center resources to study the
unexpected results of the Active Magnetic Particle Tracer Explorer
experiments. In these, barium and lithium were injected into the
earth's magnetosphere, creating, in effect, an artificial comet. The
observations contradicted existing theories and simulations. Dawson
and Ross Bollens constructed a hybrid theory and simulation that
models the observed effect.
Henry Krakauer of the College of William and Mary uses a modern
"density functional" theory of electronic structure to examine the
nature of the electron-phonon interaction, known to be responsible
for low-temperature superconductivity. The aim is to determine its
role in high- temperature superconductivity. Work like this is being
carried out throughout the world and will require the fastest parallel
supercomputers of the future. Having them available to American
researchers, including those who are not at major research
universities, gives them and American industry a competitive edge.
The research of Harold Scheraga and his group at Cornell into the
three-dimensional structure of proteins shows an equally broad
range of activity: the investigation of the fundamental interactions of
the amino acid units with each other and with solvent atoms, the
basic computational techniques needed to find the optimal structure,
and the biochemistry of proteins. This is research that is particularly
well suited to highly parallel computing, and will require, in the long
run, the full use of future teraflops machines.
Understanding the properties of the earth's crust is the subject of the
research of Larry Brown and the Consortium for Continental
Reflection Profiling (COCORP). This national group uses the
supercomputers to reduce, display, and interpret the huge data set
that is gathered by seismic probing (to 30krn or more) of the
continental crust.
I cited earlier the fundamental importance of scientific computing in
enabling the connections among different phenomena within
scientific disciplines. Even more important is its role in permitting
quantitative connections among different disciplines, that is, in
supporting multidisciplinary research. Every one of the large
problems that confront our society, and to whose solutions we expect
science to contribute, is in some sense a multidisciplinary problem.
For example, issues of the environment involve many sciences --
chemistry, physics, engineering, fluid flow, biology, and materials.
Medicine is equally demanding in its call upon diverse science. As
we have indicated, biochemistry and its relations to chemistry and
physics plays a central role in medicine. But other areas are
important as well. As part of my oral presentation, I will show a
video of a supercomputing study of the uses of ultrasound in the
treatment of eye tumors. The building of modem prosthetic devices
uses many resources of computation, from the reduction of CAT scans
to the computational optimization of the mechanical properties of the
devices. Understanding blood flow in the heart requires a mastery of
fluid dynamics of viscous media plus the knowledge of the elastic
properties of the heart and its valves.
Bringing the knowledge from these fields together to make
quantitative predictions about the effects of some technological or
regulatory proposal is a difficult undertaking, one that is utterly
impossible without the use of computational modeling on high-
performance computers. Computational modeling is the indispensable
natural language of quantitative multidisciplinary research.
An outstanding example of such work is that by Greg McRae of
Carnegie Mellon University. He uses supercomputers and
supercomputer-based visualization to explain from basic chemistry,
fluid mechanics, meteorology, and engineering the scientific effect
that underlie the development of air pollution in the Los Angeles
Basin, and the probable effects of fuel changes and regulatory
procedures. His results have been used to influence regulatory
policy constructively.
The Global Basins Research Network (GBRN), a consortium directed
by Larry Cathles of the Geology Department of Cornell University and
by Roger Anderson of Columbia University's Lamont-Dougherty
Laboratory and which includes eight academic and 11 industrial
partners, has as its goal the multidisciplinary understanding of the
chemical, physical, and mechanical processes that occur in a
sedimentary basin such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico below
Louisiana. They have assembled a composite database of the
observations of the basin and are using computational modeling to
explain the data. But simply the collection and display in a coherent
visual way has led to new and deeper understanding of the geology.
The outcome of this understanding is very likely to improve oil
recovery world-wide. I will also show a video clip of a visualization
of the data set that was prepared jointly by the Theory Center and
the GBRN.
It is important to note that this research covers a wide range of
partners, geographically dispersed, and the that the medium of
information exchange is usually visual. High- performance
networking is essential to the GBRN and to similar scientific
enterprises.
Another important development is the establishment at Cornell of
the Xerox Design Research Institute, with the participation of the
Theory Center, the Computer Science Department, and the School of
Engineering. Directed by Gregory Zack of Xerox, and involving
researchers from Xerox centers nationwide, the aim of the Institute,
quite simply, is to improve Xerox's ability to bring better products
more quickly to market. The techniques are those of computational
and computer science. A vital aspect of the research is the
development of methods whereby the geographically separate
centers can effectively collaborate. Again, high-performance
networking is key.
As our reach extends, the necessary partners required to carry out
important collaborative research will rarely be found at one
institution or even in one part of the country. Essential experimental
devices or data bases may exist anywhere. Rapid, concurrent access
is essential, and at higher demands in bandwidth. The NREN is
necessary for the full growth and exploitation of the scientific,
technological, and educational implications of computational science.
The GBRN and Xerox examples indicate how the greatest potential is
for industrial use.
The supercomputing community will soon find itself at a major
crossroads -- where the increases in performance needed for the
fulfillment of our scientific mandate will demand parallel
architectures. To exploit these new machines, a major retooling of
software and algorithms will have to take place. This is not a trivial
undertaking, yet it must be started very soon if we are to make
progress on the Grand Challenge problems in the mid-1990s.
The High-Performance Computing and Communications program will
offer us an essential opportunity to bridge the gap between today's
high performance vector machines and tomorrow's highly parallel
systems.
I have emphasized how science and its application to societal
problems are communal activities, activities that involve, more or
less directly, the entire scientific community. Bringing to bear the
transformation made possible by computational science in the most
complete and positive way requires that its techniques and strategies
be learned, used, and shared by the widest possible group of
researchers and educators. That means advancing the art, acquiring
the best and most powerful tools of hardware, software, and
algorithms, and coupling the community in the tightest possible
ways.
The "High-Performance Computing Act of 1991" is a vital step in that
direction.