Popularity, Fund Cuts Take a Byte Out of UCSD Supercomputer’s Access
Peter Rosencrantz has a lonely, seemingly endless task.
He’s looking for prime numbers--positive integers that can only be divided into other whole numbers by themselves and 1, such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13--and patterns in the way they appear.
Fortunately, the UC Santa Cruz graduate student has a formidable ally: the CRAY X-MP, a 2-year-old public-access supercomputer at UC San Diego.
Time Is Tight
Unfortunately, the already precious time on the CRAY is getting harder and harder to come by. Right now, Rosencrantz and 31 other supercomputer users, and would-be users, are in the midst of a two-week training institute at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to learn to make their programs run as quickly as possible.
Three-fifths of the supercomputer’s time is reserved for the 25 universities and research institutions that direct the center, leaving a rapidly growing number of other academic users--currently more than 1,000--scrambling for the rest of the time, said Daniel Sulzbach, the training session’s director.
“The machine we have today is pretty well saturated,” he said. “When we first got started, we by and large accepted proposals (for projects on the CRAY) if they had any merit at all. Now, it’s much more competitive. The decisions are getting harder. The panels (of scientists who allocate computer time) are turning down some requests that would have been accepted before,” said Sulzbach, who also manages user services at the center.
About two-thirds of students and professors asking for computer time--for research on projects as varied as the visual systems of frogs and semiconductor construction techniques--win approval from the panels and can get to work in about six weeks.
And so far this year, the average applicant has received only 60% of the time he wanted, Sulzbach said.
More Demand Than Time
“There is far more demand than we can satisfy, far more. The academic demand, especially, is far in excess, more than at any other center,” said Sidney Karin, the center’s director. It’s no surprise the center is so popular, he added, given its nationwide telephone hook-ups and the hands-on training provided by the staff there.
The increasing popularity of the San Diego center, one of five across the country set up and partially funded by the National Science Foundation, became a real problem this year when the foundation was forced to make budget cuts.
“We had a five-year ($50-million) budget (from the National Science Foundation), and they shorted us by 10% in fiscal 1988. That’s a million dollars,” Karin said, adding that the cutback came at a time when “we were led to believe there would be timely upgrades” of the system.
In contrast, the other centers--at the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois--are not only less busy than San Diego but they’re better off financially as well.
William Wulf, director of the National Science Foundation’s supercomputer program, says he sympathizes with San Diego’s plight.
“The whole foundation got hit with the stock market crash,” Wulf said. “A number of centers, like Illinois, got help from their states. Some (like Cornell and Pittsburgh) got help from manufacturers, others from their home institutions or industry, or some combination.”
“San Diego is more academic, which is something we encourage, but that does leave it in a tougher situation.”
As faster, more efficient supercomputers are showing up in private industry, government labs and at other universities, users and executives at UCSD are turning a frustrated shade of green.
This week, the center at the University of Pittsburgh, in a joint venture with Carnegie-Mellon University and Westinghouse Electric, announced plans to plunk down $25 million for a CRAY 3, which will be the industry’s fastest when it hits the marketplace two years from now.
San Diego is three steps behind: its CRAY X-MP has already been outdated by the CRAY Y-MP and the CRAY 2.
One of the UCSD center’s priorities is for improved graphics capability, but the major twinkle in everyone’s eyes is a CRAY 2, or CRAY Y-MP. The latter has twice as many processors and operates 30% to 50% faster than the CRAY X-MP, doing simple calculations in 6 billionths of a second as opposed to the X-MP’s comparatively lead-footed rate of 9.5 billionths of a second.
Government energy and weapons labs have CRAY 2s, and the University of Illinois is getting one. Ohio State University is getting a CRAY Y-MP, courtesy of Ohio.
“Supercomputers should not be a limiting resource,” Sulzbach, the trainer, said. “It’s crazy that these faster computers exist and professors can’t get on them.”
Acknowledging that sentiment was graduate student Rosencrantz: “If they had a faster machine, I’d be able to make a lot better use of my time.”
A National Science Foundation appropriations bill now in Congress may give the center the $4 million Karin, center director, says it needs to catch up with more commercially oriented centers--those at which businesses pay for more computer time and those where the computers themselves have been donated by companies.
Though Karin recently testified before Congress, center officials are reluctant to pin their hopes on the political process in Washington.
“We’re working very hard to get funding for an upgrade,” he said. “It occupies a major fraction of my time these days--I’m anxious that this be resolved as soon as possible.”
For example, though the center currently sells only 2% of its time to companies, both Karin and Sulzbach say they are aggressively seeking industrial “big daddies” to help sponsor an upgrade in exchange for computer time. So far, they’ve gotten a nibble, in the form of representatives from seven private-sector companies attending to this month’s training institute.
And in the past few weeks the center has floated a proposal to its consortium members, who include all of the University of California campuses and Stanford University, asking them to chip in for a new CRAY. The jury’s still out on that idea.
Meanwhile, Sulzbach is hoping his supercomputer students won’t keep getting shortchanged.
“If I had a CRAY Y-MP,” he sighed, “I’d have a lot better institute next summer.”
