Testimony

of

Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation

International Business Machines Corporation

to

The United States Senate Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation and
Competitiveness

[Introduction]{.underline}

On behalf of IBM, I would like to thank the Subcommittee, and especially
Chairman Ensign and Senator Kerry, for the opportunity to address the
evolution of supercomputing during the 1990s, the priorities we should
focus on, and the challenges we face.

First, by way of introduction, I am currently Vice President for
Technical Strategy and Innovation at the IBM Corporation, and am
responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace
developments critical to the future of the IT industry, and organizing
appropriate activities in and outside IBM in order to capitalize on
them.

My association with computers began in the summer of 1962, when prior to
entering the University of Chicago, I was employed at the computation
center where I worked part-time through my college years doing
scientific programming. I later went on to get a

Ph. D. in Physics, and did my research on computational atomic and
molecular physics. After finishing my Ph. D. at the University of
Chicago, I decided that I was better suited for computing than for
physics, switched fields and joined the Computer Sciences Department at
IBM\'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in June 1970.

By then, IBM had decided, for a variety of reasons, to exit the
scientific computing market, where it had been a leader for a number of
years. We re-entered the market in the second half of the 1980s by
adding what is called a vector feature to our mainframes, and a few
years later in the early 1990s we became a leader in the emerging area
of parallel supercomputing with our SP system. I was the general manager
of both these efforts.

Today, according to the authoritative Top500 supercomputing rankings,
IBM:

-   Leads with the world's top three supercomputers: BlueGene/L for the
    US Department of Energy (DOE) with 280.6 sustained teraflops
    (trillion floating point operations per second), BlueGene/W at
    Watson Research with 91.3 sustained teraflops (or 114.7 teraflops
    peak) and DOE's ASC Purple at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
    with 75.8 sustained teraflops (or 92.8 teraflops peak).

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-   

-   Has supplied 240 of the world's top 500 supercomputers -- more than
    any other vendor.

-   Accounts for over 1.5 petaflops of aggregate performance in the
    TOP500 list (from a total of 2.79 petaflops).

-   Has supplied more supercomputing systems than any other vendor in
    the TOP10, TOP20, TOP100 and TOP500.

-   Has supplied the most cluster systems with 177 of 364 (48.6%)

-   Has built the largest University supercomputer in the U.S - Big Red
    -- a Cluster rated at 15 teraflops and installed at the University
    of Indiana.

IBM has held the number one spot in the Top500 list since June, 2005.
Japan's Earth Simulator held the number one spot for the previous three
years. IBM was the first to deliver a system that achieved over 100
teraflops \-- that is a system that could perform over 100 trillion
operations per second \-- of peak performance; in fact Blue Gene/L has
tested at 360 teraflops (peak). And we have achieved actual sustained
performance of from 100 to 200 teraflops on a number of applications of
real importance to the National Nuclear Security Administration. The
BlueGene/L supercomputer has been measured at 10-times the energy
efficiency (measured by Watts of electricity needed to attain a
particular level of performance) of any of the top 20 supercomputers,
and it is similarly efficient in its space requirements. In the process,
we have demonstrated the practicality of using well over 100,000
microprocessors and then leveraging their computational capability
efficiently on a single problem.

Along the way, we have learned many lessons, but I believe that two are
especially significant. First, it is vitally important to work closely
with lead partners in research labs and universities in order to \"push
the envelope\" in terms of performance, applications and discovery. I
cannot overemphasize the importance of these leading-edge pilots in
propelling us forward and bringing together all the elements needed to
develop working systems that can be used for real research in important
application areas.

The second key point is the importance of the marketplace in guiding our
actions. Through my professional career I have seen many supercomputing
companies fail because they relied solely on government-based projects
and were heedless of marketplace requirements for, not only
leading-performance, but competitive prices and sophisticated software
and applications as well. While we are very proud of IBM\'s leadership
in the Top 10, Top 100 and Top 500, we are equally proud that
supercomputing is a viable business for us with many clients around the
world in both the private and public sectors.

[What is supercomputing?]{.underline}

Supercomputing is defined by three key characteristics. First, the
applications are information-intensive; second, they deal with
computation-intensive simulations - both in the natural world of
physics, chemistry and biology, and in virtual worlds, such as
engineering objects and entertainment; third they enable the
visualization of information and simulations so people can interact with
the results - as exemplified by scientific visualization and the more
recent emergence of video games played between myriad participants.

[Why is Supercomputing so Important?]{.underline}

Through the years, we have come to realize that supercomputing
architectures and applications foreshadow the future of computing
itself. Indeed, if one is removed from the advanced research, new ideas
and creative minds in supercomputing, one will inevitably misread the
major trends in computing. This is among the main reasons IBM re-entered
the market in the late 1980s.

Beyond its role as a precursor, supercomputing has become essential to
the pursuit of scientific inquiry. To quote the June 2005 report by the
President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC),
"Computational science has become the third pillar of the scientific
enterprise, a peer alongside theory and physical experiment."
Supercomputers enable scientists to either make discoveries that would
be difficult (perhaps impossible) to accomplish experimentally or to
point researchers in new directions.

Examples abound. They include (but are certainly not limited to)
developing insight into the behavior of materials under extreme
conditions that cannot be reproduced experimentally, enabling scientists
to make reliable predictions about the behavior of our nuclear stockpile
or the safety of aging nuclear reactors, for example. Supercomputers can
also find previously undiscovered sequences in so-called "junk DNA" that
may lead to new insights into its \"function\". They can also discover
\"docking sites\" for new drugs, i.e. receptors on molecules where a
drug can potentially attack a disease. Or supercomputers can perform
multi-century simulations to understand trends in the earth's climate.

[Growth of the Supercomputing Market]{.underline}

Supercomputing was once confined to a niche market, because the hardware
was so very expensive. That changed over time with the introduction of
workstation and PC-based technologies, the latter becoming immensely
popular in Linux clusters during the late 1990s. Today, we even use
low-power, low-cost micros -- consumer-based technologies \-- to attain
very high degrees of parallelism and performance, as in our Blue Gene
system, which has reached a peak of 360 trillion calculations per
second. Now, we are seeking to build supercomputers using technologies
from the gaming world, such as the Cell processor.

All these approaches leverage components from high-volume markets, and
aggregate them using specialized architectures; thus the costs are
significantly lower than in earlier days and the potential markets are
consequently much bigger.

Progress in supercomputing hardware has been nothing short of
astounding. The real challenge, however, is software, both application
software and systems software. In fact, both the 1999 PITAC report, with
which I was personally involved, and the June 2005 PITAC report made
precisely that point.

[Key Application Areas]{.underline}

But the real value of supercomputing to society is not in the
technology, architecture and software, important as they are. The value
of supercomputing is best appreciated by considering its application, so
let me review the recent progress and the promise in a few key
application areas, starting with the "classic" or more mature ones and
then moving on to some of the newer opportunities.

*Defense and National Security*

Let me start by discussing Blue Gene/L and ASC Purple, two of the
world's top three supercomputers, residing at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL). They are vital to the National Nuclear
Security Administration's (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing
Program (ASC), which in turn is an essential element of our nation\'s
Stockpile Stewardship Program. ASC provides the integrating simulation
and modeling capabilities and technologies needed to combine new and old
experimental data, past nuclear test data, and past design and
engineering experience into a powerful tool for future design assessment
and certification of nuclear weapons and their components.

Already, the simulation and modeling tools are improving the assessment
of stockpiles far in advance of schedule. Indeed, weapons designers,
scientists, and engineers now rely on ASC simulation and modeling
capabilities and technologies to assess changes occurring in aging
stockpiles of nuclear weapons and to assess and certify planned
refurbishments of weapons system components.

On March 9, 2006, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM
announced a fundamental breakthrough using ASC Purple. IBM and LLNL
demonstrated over 102 gigabytes per second of sustained read and write
performance to a single file using specialized software that
orchestrates thousands of processors and thousands of disk storage
devices.  The breakthrough is expected to stimulate development of
data-intensive applications in areas like customized medicine, online
gaming, entertainment, and homeland security, as well as in traditional
high-performance computing applications.

Then on June 22 of this year, the NNSA announced that it had achieved an
unprecedented level of performance using our Blue Gene/L. This world
record for a scientific application was set by achieving a sustained
performance of 207.3 teraflops, running "Qbox" computer code for
conducting materials science simulations critical to national security.

*Science*

In addition, the unmatched cost/effective computational capability of
Blue Gene has already resulted in new insights in biology.

The scientists at the T.J. Watson Research Center have applied
supercomputing to demonstrate that \"junk DNA" could have very startling
ramifications on cell regulation and species evolution. In another
computational experiment, they have shown that a single mutation in a
protein can render it unstable, causing it to misfold. Similar
techniques and computational models can be applied to better understand
fatal diseases.

ASTRON, in the Netherlands, is using the Blue Gene supercomputer to
develop a new type of radio telescope capable of looking back billions
of years. This research project will enable scientists to examine the
beginnings of the earliest stars and galaxies after the formation of the
universe in the wake of "the Big Bang."

Blue Gene/L will give ASTRON the flexibility and unparalleled speed it
needs to gather and analyze information from its Low Frequency Array
(LOFAR) \"software telescope\" network. Unlike current observatories
that use big optical mirrors or radio dishes to point to distant
galaxies, ASTRON will harness more than 10,000 simple radio antennas
spread across the northern Netherlands and into the German state of
Lower Saxony and interpret them using high-speed calculations.

In many domains, theory, experimental capabilities, and computational
advances are coming together in a manner that will significantly
accelerate scientific discovery.

*Weather, climate*

Supercomputing is also taking weather forecasting, modeling and research
to new levels. Research groups at several government agencies and
research laboratories are moving traditional models to scalable
supercomputer systems. These models are then used to test the validity
of our current understanding of the physics of weather and to develop
more detailed, robust, high-resolution models. When the models are
considered trustworthy, they are used for operational forecasting by the
National Weather Service and by environmental analysts to assess air
quality.

In addition, there is emerging a generation of localized,
high-resolution weather prediction capabilities customized for
application one to two days ahead of time by businesses with
weather-sensitive operations. Industries that would benefit are as
diverse as aviation, agriculture, broadcasting, communications, energy,
insurance, sports, entertainment, tourism, construction and others in
which weather is a crucial factor. Extremely fast, ultra precise weather
forecasts would be invaluable to these businesses' day-to-day
decision-making. Such forecasts could be used for competitive advantage
or to improve operational efficiency and safety.

*Engineering*

Automobile companies run virtual car crashes using complex supercomputer
simulations to ascertain how different designs react in collisions. This
reduces the number of costly prototypes, and speeds the delivery of new
models. With new regulations on safety in the auto industry and buyer
preferences for safer cars, keeping this competitive advantage is of
paramount importance to manufacturers.

Supercomputing is also being used to create more fuel-efficient
automobile designs. Exa Corporation, a global provider of wind tunnel
design simulation software uses our supercomputers to help major
automotive manufacturers and smaller suppliers solve larger, more
complex aerodynamic, acoustic and thermal engineering problems. With
virtually unlimited amounts of compute capacity available as needed,
Exa\'s clients can perform more analysis in less time \-- improving
quality and time-to-market and overall competitiveness.

Seismic imaging is an application critical to our energy future. Seismic
imaging is the process by which acoustic waves are generated and their
reflections off the earth's subsurface are collected. Seismic imaging
applications then convert the reflected waves into a 3D image of the
subsurface, revealing an image of a petroleum reservoir. This process is
used by all major oil and exploration companies. Good quality seismic
imaging is critical since dry holes can cost millions \-- in the deep
waters of the Gulf of Mexico as much as \$100 million.

IBM and Compagnie Générale de Géophysique (CGG), a world leader in
geophysical services, recently announced deployment of Europe's most
powerful seismic supercomputer to respond to growing global demand in
the petroleum industry. The system is expected to significantly reduce
processing times from the moment the geophysical data is collected to
the point when it generates a seismic image. This clustered
supercomputer will also allow CGG to boost its worldwide computing
capacity to a maximum of 113 teraflops, and give them an unprecedented
ability to respond to the extremely high performance requirements of the
oil industry.

This supercomputer installation is a result of CGG's need to continually
improve its performance in response to the demands of a highly
competitive market by optimizing the quality and speed of processing in
specific applications. The new system is being deployed at the company's
premises in Massy (France), London, Kuala Lumpur and Houston, Texas.

Let me now focus on some of the newer application opportunities.

*Energy*

**GNEP** (The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) is a Presidential
initiative to establish nuclear energy as the preferred emissions-free
alternative source of electric power. By reprocessing spent nuclear fuel
and recycling it for reuse in nuclear power plants we can control the
process and share recycled fuel and technology with developing countries
that need inexpensive energy. The United States has been encouraged in
this effort by China, France, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom as
well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Computer Simulation will be essential to the success of GNEP, allowing
us to rapidly test innovative approaches and improve our ability to
understand and control very sensitive materials. The President has
requested \$250M in FY \'07 for the program, while the House has
recommended \$150M and the Senate \$250M. We support the effort and the
concept of "making nuclear energy a renewable source of power".

**ITER** is a large international fusion experiment aimed at
demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion
energy and at trying to answer the question: Can we produce practical
amounts of fusion power on earth? In fusion, heavy forms of hydrogen are
fused at high temperatures with an accompanying production of heat
energy. ITER is a step beyond the study of plasma physics and toward the
possibility of fusion power plants actually producing electricity and
hydrogen.

The international project is made up seven partners including the United
States, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
The facility will be housed at a site in Cadarache, France. We support
the United States' participation in ITER and the funding requested by
the President in the fiscal '07 budget.

*Bioinformatics and Computational Biology*

These involve the use of techniques from applied mathematics,
informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve biological
problems. Genomes (an organism's complete information set) are sequenced
and assembled, and then become candidates for data mining. This data
mining is often referred to as bioinformatics.

The objective is a better understanding of the relationship between
specific genes and diseases, an understanding that is essential to the
development of therapies. The point is to develop drugs that will target
specific genes and focus on a specific disease. With the volume of
genetic data proliferating, it long ago became impractical to analyze
DNA sequences manually. Today, [computer
programs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program_) search the
[genome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_) of thousands of
organisms, containing billions of
[nucleotides](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide_).

Bioinformatics has great potential for expediting delivery of new,
individualized therapies to patients.

Brain research is another promising scientific pursuit utterly dependent
on supercomputing. It is also the purpose of a joint research initiative
between the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM.
Nicknamed the "Blue Brain Project," it is intended to take brain
research to a new level.\
\
Scientists from EPFL and IBM are working together using the huge
computational capacity of Blue Gene to create a detailed model of the
circuitry in the neocortex \-- the largest and most complex part of the
human brain. By expanding the project to model other areas of the brain,
scientists hope eventually to build an accurate, computer-based model of
the entire brain.\
\
Relatively little is actually known about how the brain works. Using the
digital model, scientists will run computer-based simulations of the
brain at the molecular level, shedding light on internal processes such
as thought, perception and memory. Scientists also hope to understand
more about how and why certain microcircuits in the brain malfunction,
\-- a failure thought to be the cause of psychiatric disorders such as
autism, schizophrenia and depression.

*Health Care*

Medical science increasingly relies on advanced information systems to
share information, mine that information for trends and insights, and
use those findings to head off disease or improve treatment. This takes
sophisticated computer hardware and software, and the technology has
advanced to the stage where truly wondrous things that yesterday were
only wishful thinking can now be tackled.

For example, The Scripps Research Institute and IBM researchers are
working on new technology to anticipate, manage and contain infectious
diseases like avian flu. Using Blue Gene, they are trying to devise a
way to track the emergence of new virus strains and map human and animal
responses to them. This capability will help scientists and governments
to better understand viruses and respond effectively to potential
pandemics. It could also enable vaccines to be created quickly enough to
prevent massive outbreaks.

Likewise, QuantumBio Inc., a provider of software tools for drug,
biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies, uses the Blue Gene
supercomputer to help satisfy its testing needs. With Blue Gene,
QuantumBio is able to provide users with the opportunity to study
molecules of interest over a secure and integrated system on an
as-needed or on-demand basis.

*Business*

SmartOps, a leading provider of enterprise-class supply chain
optimization solutions for the manufacturing and distribution
industries, used the Blue Gene supercomputer to port and test their
Multistage Inventory Planning and Optimization (MIPO) solution in
preparation for offering a large-scale hosted solution for their
clients.

Likewise, in the Finance Industry the most competitive firms are those
that can maximize returns and minimize risk, all in the shortest time
possible. Key to success is the ability to apply computational power to
increasingly complex and demanding business processes.

Workloads such as risk management, portfolio analysis, derivatives
pricing and actuarial simulations can all benefit from the application
of supercomputing's greater computational power.

*Learning*

Highly realistic, visual interfaces first appeared with [scientific
applications](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_visualization) as
well as with flight simulators used to train pilots and with war game
simulators used to train military personnel. These visual interfaces
(along with the accompanying sounds) have been increasingly enhanced
with [digital
animation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_animation) and [video
games](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game). Video games are
particularly important because in addition to their very realistic
visual images and sound effects, they are also highly interactive and
increasingly collaborative, and thus a good launch pad for thinking
about how people can best interact with all kinds of computer
applications as well as with each other in the future. Furthermore, the
success of video games with millions of people has stimulated the
introduction of very inexpensive and powerful technologies, such those
around Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's upcoming Play Station 3.

The new highly visual, realistic, and interactive interfaces now hold
the promise of sparking a major round of innovation for computer
applications in general, both in rethinking how to best integrate these
new kinds of visual interfaces with existing applications, as well as
inspiring whole new categories of applications that we cannot even
envision today.

One application area that holds great promise is learning across the
broad spectrum of needs, from K --12 all the way to the introduction of
sophisticated new procedures for professionals. After all, since our
brains are wired for sight and sound, these new applications should be
able to approach humans on human terms, and thus significantly
facilitate the learning process.

[Conclusion]{.underline}

Clearly, supercomputing has advanced to the point of being essential in
myriad endeavors, in the laboratory certainly but most assuredly in the
commercial world as well. It is indispensable to the process of
innovation and to the ability of the United States to thrive in a
globalized economy that grows more competitive by the day -- something
The National Innovation Act of 2005 (S 2109), which we support, is meant
to foster.

The Federal Government has significant influence in setting the agenda
for basic research and in turn the use of high-performance computing in
pursuit of innovation and competitiveness. We, in our industry
participate in that agenda as partners. In order to realize the full
benefits for our country, Congress, in partnership with the industry,
should clearly outline and invest in a long-term strategy. For example,
the President's Budget request for fiscal year 2007 includes high
performance computing activities funded by the Networking and IT
Research and Development (NITRD) agencies including the National Science
foundation, Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. These activities range from biomedical computing to
earth and space science research to weather modeling frameworks.

Clear direction and consistent funding will prompt industry and academia
to invest as well, and in partnership we can address many of the serious
challenges that face our nation. In the process, we will expand and
deepen our knowledge of much of the world around us and our ability to
influence it. These kinds of efforts unite government, universities and
private industry in a productive collaboration -- a partnership for
which there is no substitute.