The San Jose Mercury-News yesterday had two headlines that caused me to scratch my head . . . .
The first said "I-Phones top $100 Billion" but the story didn't support the headline. We'll discuss that in a subsequent post.
The second said "HP building new supercomputer" WHAT???
Here's a picture of the supercomputer headline and the first paragraph, along with a picture of "the machine" (must be a mock-up), followed by the citation
https://www.klove.com/news/tech-science/hp-building-new-supercomputer-to-be-one-of-world-s-fastest-19686
The 'deja vu' of this announcement was, for me, incredibly auspicious. During my nearly 30 years at HP, of which some 23 were in Colorado, I spent two years working for NCAR because of my role with the Colorado Air Pollution Commission, circa 1970. That role led to discovery, the first discovery I hasten to note, that emphysema (now lumped into COPD) is NOT just a smoker's disease, nor even primarily a smoker's disease, despite fifty years of the American Medical Association, the American Lung Association, and the recently maligned Center for Disease Control (CDC) insistence that it accounts for 85-90% of all COPD victims. Pure bullshit, as can be demonstrated with any decent geospatial longitudinal study. And this fraud is still perpetrated on an unaware America (and world).
The 'deja vu' part is that NCAR and the Colorado Dept of Health had practically no compute power in 1970. One IBM 360/40 if I recall correctly (though it might have been the scientific configuartion of the 360/44) and access to a CDC 6600, courtesy of Kaman Nuclear next door to our HP Colorado Springs facility. So when they handed me a stack of Z-fold paper with 2,754 names and 17 fields of data for deceased Colorado residents who were said to have died from emphysema, the question was "what do you do with this stack of stuff?"
Living in Colorado Springs, I had access to one of the first HP 9100A desktop calculators, and also to Lionel Baldwin's distance learning modules from Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, so I could take an advanced statistics course (I never liked that during my college days, but now I needed it)
With these tools, with virtually no one in the world possessed, except for the few hundred folk who had an HP9100 at the time, I was able to construct incredible graphs that demonstrated a different causal agent (in fact, several) that related to sub-micron particulate matter in a toxic gaseous environment--e.g. high mountain valleys with a local cement plant or lumber mill burning slash or with trapped auto exhausts. One particularly interesting finding--closed-cab air conditioned tractors with smoking drivers or alfalfa dehydrating plants were deadly on the Colorado plains. See, for example, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236865558_Confronting_COPD
The response, I expected, would be "Wow, that is fascinating" but instead it was "Well, how could you do something like that--our computers don't show that." It was easy to ignore, and in fact, still is. People, very often among the smartest, really resist being shown a new way that contradicts their earlier skillset and learning. Didn't Thomas Kuhn write compellingly about such human behavior?
So, WHAT will NCAR do with this beast? I think of the week prior to the Katrina hurricane, when NOAA computers predicted the onslaught on New Orleans 96 hours in advance, but NASA (who was the 'climate' agency) forbid them to publish it. NASA's own computers did not predict the issue until 28 hours in advance, which was too late to get effective evacuations. NOAA, as it turned out, had better supercomputer technology at the time (NASA was loathe to discuss that, let me assure you), built by Intel's advanced projects team, led by Justin Rattner who had led NSF's ASCI RED supercomputer effort earlier. Rattner brought both groups to an Intel Fellows meeting, where we heard the story. The story, as you may surmise, never made the public press.
His success, though, did get noticed. In December 1996, Rattner was featured as Person of the Week by ABC World News for his visionary work on the Department of Energy ASCI Red System, the first computer to sustain one trillion operations per second (one teraFLOPS) and the fastest computer in the world between 1996 and 2000. In 1997, Rattner was honored as one of the Computing 200, the 200 individuals having the greatest impact on the U.S. computer industry today, and subsequently profiled in Wizards and Their Wonders (ACM Press). See https://www.huffpost.com/author/justin-r-rattner
I cannot help but add two postscripts here:
1. Rattner worked for HP Computing in the early days (and PARC) before joining Intel in 1973.
2. And three people from HP in 1997 were honored in that ACM book, Wizards, for the "200 in America who made computing". Packard, Hewlett, and House (yup, me, imagine). Should have had Birnbaum and Worley for sure. John Cocke, who did the RISC work for IBM working for Joel, is in.
See https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Their-Wonders-Portraits-Computing/dp/0897919602
No comments:
Post a Comment