TITAN and the Exascale - difficult power?

The Titan supercomputer here at ORNL was recently unveiled as the world's fastest (for now) and led to several of us talking on various news outlets such as the Washington Post, BBC, NPR and CNN. Certainly, us "apps guys"  congratulate the hardies on the big iron they have managed to design and construct, and as we move towards the exascale there are exciting possibilities as to what theoretically one could do with such machines. But, now, more than ever, it has become clear that the promise of these supercomputers will remain unrealized without concerted and sustained methodological and software development. As far as applications in the biological and soft matter sciences are concerned, little emphasis has been put on these aspects. Although, thanks largely to our own, unfunded efforts, we are just about able to scale on TITAN, doing better won't happen without new methods being developed by teams of theoreticians over several years. It makes little sense to me to invest billions of dollars over a decade or so in these machines but virtually nothing in what is needed to make them work well, does it? 

Financing College Athletics: a 2 billion dollar subsidy

(Photo: Daily Beacon)

Today the University of Tennessee announced the hiring of Buster Jones from U. Cincinnati as our new football coach, dumping a financial burden onto the university on top of the payouts to the two other recently-fired coaches,  Phillip Fulmer and Derek Dooley. A consequence of this trigger-happy firing behavior is that the Athletics Department will forgo its usual donations to the university academics for three years, and this has led to significant criticism, including from ex Faculty Senate president Louis Gross recently on local TV.

Now, as a relative outsider, i.e. having been parachuted in from Europe, maybe I have a fresh perspective on things.  In my opinion the world of big-money college sports should be completely  financially independent from the university. I stress here the "big money" aspect, because having a variety of sports accessible to students at a university is generally beneficial, and part of student education. Financing track and field, football fields (not stadia), a swimming pool, baseball diamonds, changing facilities etc is certainly part and parcel of the standard university experience.

But subsidizing multimillion-dollar big-money football with money ostensibly given to finance the education of the kids of the state is an unjustifiable diversion.  Now, NCAA figures list UT as one of the few colleges whose athletic department actually does not draw much upon university finances. This may be the case, although it is subject to argument. For example, the rest of us pay overhead on income generated for UT whereas the athletics department does not. But where there appears to be little room for doubt is that, on average, athletic spending nationwide is solidly in the red. The USA Today database of 218 Division I public schools  for 2009-2010 documents a total of $6.2 billion spent on college sport of which $2 billion came from subsidies from the schools, and this in a time of general dire cuts and increased tuition fees. 


Now, I'm not saying that  the taxpayers of a state don't have the right to subsidize their favorite college sports teams if they wish. But it should be done in a transparent way.  Formally separating the finances of the big-money sports programs from the minor sports and the academics would be a sensible way of achieving this. 

L'Aquila Earthquake Scientists - Rightly Convicted?

The opprobrium over the conviction and jailing of the L'Aquila earthquake scientists seems to have been nearly universal in the scientific community, which seems to be convinced that science itself has been put on the dock. However, a friend who is on the science faculty at L'Aquila opines that the convictions were RIGHT, as they were due to failure to communicate risk, rather than the failure of science. Apparently the Risk Committee met, then left without communicating anything themselves (they left it to a non-scientist, who apparently told people to go and drink some wine). While Italy has a proud tradition of ignoring science, this case does not seem to cleanly fit into that category and I think the AAAS, Nature etc maybe rushed too quickly in their condemnations of the judgement.  That doesn't mean I'm in favor of the severity, though. The jail sentences certainly smack of scapegoating  and the general public may not be able to tell the difference between condemning communication failure and condemning science itself.

NOT a voter.

Jeremy Smith's friends on Facebook are all flagging themselves as "I am a voter".
So here's my Facebook response:


"Jeremy Smith is NOT a voter, and has not been for 28 years. The reason he has not voted is that Jeremy has not been allowed to become a citizen anywhere other than the UK despite having spent ten years in one country (France), eight in the second (Germany) and now ten in the third (USA).  During that time he paid a lot of taxes to governments that did not represent him.  In contrast, he has paid nothing to the UK government, whose policies he had the right to vote upon even for fifteen years after having left the country, until the ultimate, global revocation of his right to suffrage.


Ten years must be considered to be rather long for a  'visit' and so Jeremy hesitates to think of himself as a 'visitor'.  Rather,  Jeremy thinks that if somebody lives and pays taxes in a country then they should vote there, and not according to some arbitrary definition of citizenship."

BBC Clip - clarification required.

Today a BBC clip on the Titan supercomputer just appeared, in which various people talk about the computer and I mention some possible applications, mentioning goals to 'save the environment, cure all known diseases and solve the world's energy problems'.  However, the clip as edited may give some people the impression that we will actually be able to solve all these great societal problems with Titan! However, of course, all the computer is likely to be able to do is to make contributions to these fields. For example, theoretically, it would be able to screen millions of compounds on hundreds of protein targets, and that might help us design better, safer drugs. Also, it may be able to perform new simulations useful in understanding biomass pretreatment and processes in the environment.  Also, I mention in the clip atomic detail models of the living cell, which may be 'theoretically' become possible with exascale supercomputing, but only on the microsecond simulation timescale,  such that we need also to pursue ensemble based approaches on smaller systems that can extend simulation timescales. What was not mentioned in the clip, but was said to the reporter,  was the significant, fundamental  algorithmic and methodological problems to be overcome  in order to exploit the full power of these new machines. There is little support for tackling these challenges, at least from my perspective, and primarily for this reason the medium-term usefulness of supercomputing in the biological and medical sciences seems rather uncertain at this point.

Baskervilles Blues Band circa 1996

Jeremy, Marty, Bill, Philippe, Jean-Michel.

Check this smooth number out.

Why I'm Against Affirmative Action

I just served on an National Science Foundation  panel, in which  'broadening the participation of underrepresented groups' is a priority when choosing which proposals to fund, then came back to Europe where the German Bundesrat passed a measure requiring 40% of executive boards to be female. This made me think further about the general principle of affirmative action, and especially in science. 

NSF gives extra points to proposals in which PIs make special efforts to make campus visits and presentations at institutions that serve underrepresented groups, mentor early-career scientists and engineers from underrepresented groups, scientists who participate in conferences, workshops and field activities where diversity is a priority etc. 

I think some aspects of affirmative action, and especially the Bundesrat decision,  serve neither the underrepresented groups or anyone else. Quotas   automatically decrease quality  (because selection is not purely on achievement and suitability), discriminate against majority groups and lead to failure and inferiority complexes for those favored. Hence,  I agree with the conservative Supreme Court Gratz v Bollinger decision which barred quotas and disagree with Grutter v Bollinger that allowed them in a different form. Further, affirmative action  only makes sense to me if discrimination on the basis of nationality is removed. Right now, you can be a ethnic minority female disabled  Romanian or Thai working in the U.S. but unless you are a U.S. citizen you cannot be an affirmative action beneficiary.

As for diversity, in science in the U.S. (not France or Germany) this happens naturally, and our lab has always been wonderfully diverse, with, for example, sometimes simultaneously members from more than 15 different countries, but that wasn't intentional, it just happened, and unfortunately it's not what myopically qualifies as diverse for the U.S. Government.

Nevertheless, especially in the U.S., there is enormous untapped talent in the economically disadvantaged population. Our efforts should go into encouraging economically disadvantaged kids and educating their parents, well before university, and it shouldn't matter what nationality, ethnicity or gender they are:  white, black, Hispanic, Slovakian, Asian, disabled, French, American. Also, of course, those disadvantaged kids who prove themselves to be  hard-working and talented need to have an opportunity to pursue higher education equal to their richer peers.   Equal opportunity. No doors closed. Yes, all need to be given "a shot" but none propelled through on a soft cushion. 

Notwithstanding, given the hypothetical situation where I must choose between two Ph.D. candidates with exactly the same grades:  one rich and the other poor, I will choose the poor kid every time. Not through pity or positive discrimination or for championing underrepresented groups, but simply because I'm likely to get more bang for my buck from a kid who has fought their way out of the projects.

Now, let's get down to organizing those East Knoxville high school lectures...