Gates Lays Out Vision of Future of Supercomputing

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates shared his vision of the future of supercomputing yesterday during a keynote event at the SC 05 supercomputing conference in Microsoft's hometown of Seattle. While the era of the sub-$10,000 desktop supercomputer cluster is upon us, users still need better software to harness the computing power, and to consume its results. Microsoft, which also unleashed a public beta of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 yesterday, says Visual Studio and Office may fit the bill.

Gates started his keynote address by talking about the challenge of parallelism, which he says is "becoming a very important challenge, particularly as the clock speed of the microprocessor won't be increasing at the rates that it did in the past." When clock speeds top out at around 6 GHz to 8 GHz, "we'll have to bring in techniques around parallelization and those are techniques, of course, that the high-end has been working on and understanding for a very long period of time."

Gates commented on a tantalizing feat of having the world's entire body of knowledge at ones' fingertips. "As [computers] become cheaper, smaller, as the screens become better, we can think of even something like reading moving over to the digital realm and so that instead of having a library of papers, simply by being connected to the Internet through wired Internet or wireless Internet you can browse the full library of knowledge and annotate that and communicate relative to that in a far better way than paper systems would have allowed in the past."

In the future, Tablet PCs will enable users to interact with computers not just through the keyboard, but also through speech, Gates says. "And we'll have lots of cameras so that we can see what's going on, understanding whether you're paying attention to the computer or talking to someone else," he says.

In fact, one could say we're moving toward the "digitization of everything," Microsoft's founder says. "A lot of compute clusters now are doing things like simulating new product designs. A new plane, a new car will be done on a digital basis, and there should be a deep understanding of what happens in a crash or how does it wear over time by using these digital models instead of having to figure those things out in the physical world."

The ability of scientists to access the right data and apply it the right way will be critical for many scientific disciplines, including astronomy and even social sciences. "The life sciences with genomic and proteonomic data, it's an explosion of information that people around the world should be able to benefit from the results that other people are gathering together," he says. "And so in the same way that mathematics has been a tool of all the sciences, in the years ahead we can think of computer software that manages lots of information, that lets you mine that information, that will likewise be a very critical tool."

Of course, it's the role of supercomputers to break up those giant accumulations of data, and to make some sense out of it. Microsoft is getting into the supercomputer business through a new release of its operating system called Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which was released for a public beta test yesterday, as well as through working with ISVs, OEM providers of supercomputers, and HPC centers at universities around the world (see "HPC Version of Windows Server Goes to Public Beta").

"We'll have supercomputers of all sizes," Gates says, including some that will cost less than $10,000 and sit at your desk. These "desktop clusters" will be good for getting preliminary results for simple problems, but will also be able to communicate with bigger supercomputers. "That means that when you want to take that same computation and do it with a finer level of detail, submitting it off to a cluster that's dramatically larger and can do more will be extremely straightforward." What's more, since all this data will be in XML formats and carry metadata tags, it will be a relatively simple matter to see where that data came from and its context, Gates says.

While supercomputer hardware that can do tremendous amounts of processing has become very affordable, and the data format (XML) has basically been standardized, Gates says the actual software used in HPC computations could use some work. "We need to take the techniques that have been developed for things like business intelligence and data mining . . . [and] apply those in these realms as well." This software should be very visual, very easy to use, and should "only require as much software understanding as is absolutely necessary."

Gates mentioned the upcoming new version of Office and an upcoming server version of Excel that's multi-threaded and much more scalable, as examples of the kind of software that could be used to make HPC applications more visual.

At the same time users get new ways to visualize their supercomputer programs and data, there should be pains taken to ensure interoperability with other platforms. "These solutions will often be extremely heterogeneous and of course Unix and Linux have been very important in this environment," Gates says. "Making sure that all these things are going to work together . . . is just one element of how software can do a better job for scientists and designers."

Microsoft, which no doubt employs several desktop clusters at its Redmond, Washinton, headquarters, is very good about providing timely transcripts of its executives' speeches. A transcript of Gates speech at the SC05 event yesterday is available on his Web site.