[plug] Microsoft researchers recommend Linux!

[Chris Caston]

Microsoft employees != Bill Gates vision

I bet you'd be surprised to see how many MS developers fiddle around
with some flavor of Linux or BSD during their free time.

regards,

Chris Caston

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 23:53, Leon Brooks wrote:
> 
>     http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/technology/02SUPE.html
> 
> Highlight:
> 
>     The researchers, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, scientists at
>     Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, presented the argument
>     last month in a meeting of the National Research Council's
>     Computer Science and Telecommunications Board at Stanford
>     University.
> 
>     [...]
> 
>     By rewriting existing scientific programs, they say, researchers
>     will be able to get powerful computing from inexpensive clusters
>     of personal computers that are running the free Linux software
>     operating system. Many scientists are now adapting their work to
>     these parallel computing systems, known as Beowulfs, which make
>     it possible to cobble together tremendous computing power at low
>     cost.
> 
>     "The supercomputer vendors are adamant that I am wrong," Dr.
>     Bell said. "But the Beowulf is a Volkswagen and these people are
>     selling trucks."
> 
> <quote>
> In Computing, Weighing Sheer Power Against Vast Pools of Data
> 
> By JOHN MARKOFF
> 
> SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 - For almost two decades the federal government 
> has heavily underwritten elaborate centers to house the world's fastest 
> supercomputers. The policy has been based on the assumption that only 
> government money could ensure that the nation's research scientists had 
> the computing power they needed to pursue projects like simulating the 
> flow of air around a jet airplane wing, mimicking the way proteins are 
> folded inside cells or modeling the global climate.
> 
> But now two leading American computer researchers are challenging that 
> policy. They argue that federal money would be better spent directly on 
> the scientific research teams that are the largest users of 
> supercomputers, by shifting the financing to vast data-storage systems 
> instead of building ultrafast computers.
> 
> Innovation in data-storage technology is now significantly outpacing 
> progress in computer processing power, they say, heralding a new era 
> where vast pools of digital data are becoming the most crucial element 
> in scientific research.
> 
> The researchers, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, scientists at Microsoft's Bay 
> Area Research Center, presented the argument last month in a meeting of 
> the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications 
> Board at Stanford University.
> 
> "Gordon and I have been arguing that today's supercomputer centers will 
> become superdata centers in the future," said Dr. Gray, an expert in 
> large databases who has been working with some of the the nation's 
> leading astronomers to build a powerful computer-based telescope.
> 
> The policy challenge spelled out by the Microsoft researchers comes as a 
> quiet national policy debate over the future of supercomputing is 
> taking place among experts in scientific, industrial and military 
> computing.
> 
> In February the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel on 
> Cyberinfrastructure issued a report calling on the nation to spend more 
> than $1 billion annually to modernize its high-performance computing 
> capabilities.
> 
> Separately, a study completed last year by a group of military agencies 
> was released in April. Titled "Report on High Performance Computing for 
> National Security," it calls for spending $180 million to $390 million 
> annually for five years to modernize supercomputing for a variety of 
> military applications.
> 
> Computer scientists added that the construction of the Japanese Earth 
> Simulator, which is now ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer, 
> has touched off alarm in some parts of the United States government, 
> with some officials advocating even more resources for the nation's 
> three national supercomputer centers, located in Pittsburgh, at the 
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of 
> California at San Diego.
> 
> Whatever decisions the government makes could have vast implications for 
> computing.
> 
> The decision in 1985 to build a group of what were then five 
> supercomputer centers linked together by a 56-kilobit-per-second 
> computer network was a big impetus for development of the modern 
> high-speed Internet, said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is 
> director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and 
> Information Technology.
> 
> He said that Dr. Bell and Dr. Gray were correct about the data-centric 
> technology trend and that increasingly the role of the nation's 
> supercomputer centers would shift in the direction of being vast 
> archives. Rapidly increasing network speeds would make it possible to 
> increasingly distribute computing tasks.
> 
> Central to the Bell-Gray argument is the vast amount of data now being 
> created by a new class of scientific instruments that integrate sensors 
> and high-speed computers.
> 
> While the first generation of supercomputing involved simulating 
> physical processes with relatively small data sets, the tremendous 
> increase in data storage technology has led to a renaissance in 
> experimental science, Dr. Gray said.
> 
> The nation should forget about financing the world's fastest computers, 
> he said, and instead turn the nation's attention back toward science.
> 
> "The core of our argument is to give money back to the sciences and let 
> them do the planning," he said.
> 
> Dr. Gray and Dr. Bell, a legendary computer designer who oversaw the 
> national supercomputer centers for two years during the 1980's as a 
> director for the National Science Foundation, call their current 
> approach to computing "information centric" and "community centric." By 
> rewriting existing scientific programs, they say, researchers will be 
> able to get powerful computing from inexpensive clusters of personal 
> computers that are running the free Linux software operating system. 
> Many scientists are now adapting their work to these parallel computing 
> systems, known as Beowulfs, which make it possible to cobble together 
> tremendous computing power at low cost.
> 
> "The supercomputer vendors are adamant that I am wrong," Dr. Bell said. 
> "But the Beowulf is a Volkswagen and these people are selling trucks."
> 
> The Bell-Gray proposal has been greeted with skepticism from the 
> supercomputer centers and in some cases from scientists, too.
> 
> "I believe the dramatic increase in data the scientific community is 
> producing will lead to the increasing importance of the scientific 
> computing centers," said Horst D. Simon, a mathematician who is the 
> director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center in 
> Berkeley, Calif.
> 
> He said that scientific research projects were turning increasingly to 
> his computing center to take advantage of its professional management 
> and technical support for managing their experiments' data.
> 
> Some other computer scientists say that Dr. Bell and Dr. Gray have 
> correctly identified a fundamental technology trend, but that they are 
> wrong in stating that the United States no longer needs to focus on 
> developing the most powerful computers.
> 
> "Beowulf clusters are an attractive alternative," said Daniel A. Reed, 
> director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the 
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "However, we still need a 
> national-scale capability at the very high end."
> 
> A number of other scientists said they believed that Dr. Bell and Dr. 
> Gray were overstating the power of the inexpensive Beowulf computing 
> clusters.
> 
> "I'm not sure I agree with them on which is the cheap commodity computer 
> and which is the specialized system," said Eric Bloch, a physicist at 
> the Washington Advisory Group, a Washington-based science and 
> consulting group, who is a former director of the National Science 
> Foundation.
> 
> He said that supercomputer centers were still vital because they 
> integrated systems that could be made available to scientific 
> communities that might use the world's fastest computer if it were 
> available.
> </quote>
> 
> Cheers; Leon
> 
>