Daniel Reed | It's software at the core

 

Connecting state and local government leaders

It seems fitting that Daniel Reed is director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, because he is a bit of a Renaissance man himself ' at least when it comes to computing. Reed has proved influential in a remarkable variety of spheres.

It seems fitting that Daniel Reed is director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, because he is a bit of a Renaissance man himself ' at least when it comes to computing. Reed has proved influential in a remarkable variety of spheres. He advises the president as a member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. He leads the Computer Research Association.He's also overseen the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and he was principal investigator and chief architect at the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project.The way Reed reckons, RCI's goal is to push beyond the traditional boundaries of computer science. It tackles tough computational problems not only with computer science but also with the aid of business and the social sciences. The institute was founded in 2004 by Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina. The highest priority is to look at how computer technology affects broad societal problems. It's really about bringing people together across disciplinary boundaries. I think a lot of problems we deal with in this decade lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Our role is to be a catalyst for innovation. And that spans everything from traditional computer science to supporting the humanities or performing arts.There is advancing computing as [a goal], which is the basic technology research, and then there is application. And it is important to keep them coupled. For any given technology, there could be a wide variety of ways it could be advanced. Having a set of driving problems that defines opportunity will help push technology in certain directions.One of the big problems we're addressing now is rapid population growth in environmentally sensitive areas. As an example, in North Carolina, we have a rapid coastal population growth in areas with fragile ecosystems [that] are susceptible to severe weather. How do we look at predicting the effect of hurricanes and storm surge in those areas? Our goal is to forecast what the impact is likely to be and where it will happen and ' in the longer term ' use that information to influence zoning and planning.So to do all this, you need to bring together people who work for different organizations and live in different places and have different areas of expertise ' oceans and atmospheric science, computational modeling, state planning for disasters and logistics. We provide the computing capability, software and the people who will fill the holes among the groups. You have to recognize the individual agencies' missions. There are problems that you want to solve that don't fall within any particular agency's mission but depend on the agencies working together. So given the realities of their missions, you have to find the piece of collaborative solution that would also advance the mission goal of each agency. If you can do that, it's a win for them and, concurrently, you solve a problem that everyone can take partial credit for.Working with the federal agencies, I've found that in many cases the senior folks are very much aware of these larger problems, and they are often very much pleased to see a group that can be a neutral ground for them to work together. It's the software. The challenge will be how to deal with the explosive growth of multicore processors. We will see a hundred-plus core chips soon, and those will be embedded in ever-larger systems. Petascale systems will have hundreds of thousands of cores. The software is not keeping pace with that.The killer issue is how to exploit large-scale parallelism in a productive way.The truth is, with commodity technology, any country in the world can occupy the top of the Top 500 list [of the world's most powerful supercomputers]. It is just a matter of political will and money. The hardware in some sense is just money ' sometimes large amounts of money, but it's just money. The United States has long had pre-eminence in that domain, but most of that technology is a commodity that anyone can buy. Exploiting that efficiently ' that is the hard part. We're in a race for macho-flops, we're not in the race for time-to-solution. And that is an entirely different metric, one that is tied up with building an integrated, well-balanced ecosystem of hardware and software.On the government side, those problems take long-term investment. Over the years, we've launched many different projects to try to develop software to deal with parallelism in an automatic way, and we've never sustained these programs. We've killed them after a handful of years. The notion of saying this problem may take a decade to solve and that we'll have no success in the first 18 to 24 months is a hard sell.The hope is [that] emergence of multicore [commodity processors] will force those issues out in the open, and the commercial market will have to deal with them, and that success will trickle up to the high-end computing. If we built biological organisms the way we built computer software, the first time a cell died, the organism would die. In system design, we presume that everything works correctly, by and large. Networking software is one of the few exceptions. But large, complex systems have unexpected kinds of behaviors and actions when components go wrong. You want the overall system to continue to operate reliably even when components fail. We don't have good mechanisms to design systems with those characteristics.And, arguably, large software systems are the most complex creations that humans have ever done. They are far more complex than buildings ' even very large buildings. A 100 million-line software system is incredibly complex, and we still build those things in a craftsmen model. We don't have good organizing principles that will let us design them to meet certain specifications.






GCN: What does RCI do?

Reed:







GCN: It sounds like you have some insight on how to work across organizational boundaries. How do you unlock experts from their silos?

Reed:



GCN: What are some of the fundamental problems that will bedevil computer science in the next few years?

Reed:








GCN: You have said that software resiliency is another problem.


Reed:


X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.