Thursday Keynote

Today, the thrust area highlighted in the keynote is Sustainability. The speaker will be former Vice President Al gore. Right now we are hearing from the SC '10 chair inviting us all to New Orleans next year.

Technology thrusts for '10 include Climate Simulation, Heterogeneous Computing (e.g. combining x86 processors with GPU processors), and Data Intensive Computing.

SC 10 will have more exhibitor space than ever and 300+ Gbps network connectivity.


Now up, Al Gore.

"I used to be the next President of the United States" *laughter* "I don't think that is funny"

Al is a "recovering politician", talking about working to help establish funding for supercomputing centers and the Internet during his political career. AL GORE INVENTED SUPERCOMPUTERS. Al Gore was actually present at the first SC conference in 1988 in Orlando, FL.

After a few more funny stories about life after politics (people telling him he looks just like Al Gore at restaurants), and apologizing because he was supposed to attend in 1997 but had to fill in for President Clinton at some other event, he is now talking about how important the work we are doing is. Technology is important for the discoveries, but also so that developing countries can skip the pollution intensive phase developed countries have gone through. More urban development will occur in the next 35 years than has occurred in the history of civilization. Modeling will help develop these new urban areas to be more sustainable and less automobile centric.

Supercomputing was a transformative development, similar to the invention of the telescope or other revolutionary scientific instrument.

90 million tons of global warming pollutants go into the atmosphere today, and now we know how thin our atmosphere really is. It is not as vast as it appears to our perspective, and images from space have confirmed it is a very thin shell and not impervious to our actions. Oil is the dominant source of energy after the first oil well in the world was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. In the last 100 years, the worlds population has quadrupled, should stabilize at ~9 billion in 2050.

The climate change crisis is actually the second major climate crisis, the first was the effects of CFCs on the Ozone layer and the large hole that developed over Antartica. One year after the discovery of the hole a treaty was developed to phase out the chemicals responsible. This was criticized as too weak, but tougher and tougher standards were set as alternatives were developed, and now it has been a success. The same holds true for climate change, any politically acceptable treaty will not be enough, but it will be a start. We need to introduce systematic changes that produce much higher levels of efficiency, and supercomputing will be key to replacing terribly inefficient technology such as the internal combustion engine. If you measure the energy used to move a person with an automobile, the car is about 99.92 inefficient when you look at how much energy actually goes to moving the passenger compared to moving the vehicle or what is lost to inefficiencies. As these technologies are developed it will start to make business sense to move to less polluting technology. Coal fired generation is also inefficient, only 1/3rd of the potential energy becomes electricity, the rest is lost mostly as waste heat. Solar and wind needs supercomputing.

Moores Law was a self-fulfilling expectation, not a law. It was anticipated how much of a revolution this growth in computational power would be so R&D resources were allocated to allow the growth. By next year there will be more than 1 billion transistors per person in the world. We can transform our energy system by recognizing the potential and making the necessary R&D investments. As long as we send 100s of billions of dollars every year to other countries for energy we are vulnerable. We need to stay the course, after the drop in fuel prices people do not see it as much of a crisis - they are in a temporary trance.

Supercomputing vastly expands our ability to understand complex realities. How do we, as human beings, individually relate to the powerful tool of supercomputing. The 3D internet (or as the CTO of Intel told us it is more accurately the 3D Web) will revolutionize the interface between humans and incredibly powerful machines. Biocomputing will revolutionize the treatment of disease. Modeling will revolutionize alternative energy.

Climate modeling will help develop political consensus to act quickly to solve the crisis. Without action, climate change can threaten human civilization. It is a planetary emergency.

short advertisement:
repoweramerica.org, 100% of proceeds from the sale of his new book will be donated to environmental causes

The environmental crisis does not trigger instinctive fears or responses to the threat, it requires reasoning. Since the distance between causes and consequences is so long we need to make the global scale and speed of this crisis obvious. Climate modeling and supercomputing will be critical.

We are not operating in a sustainable manner, understanding and responding is the challenge of our time.

Solar is promising, the key is to driving scalability and reductions in cost (Moore's Law for solar technology). We need a distributed energy architecture. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass are all important as is new nuclear technology. Global scalability is limited by controlling nuclear proliferation. Electric vehicles can be a distributed battery for peak electricity loads.

Reducing deforestation is also an important challenge. Deforestation is responsible for significant CO2 emissions, and also the loss of genetic information (biodiversity) is important. Selling rain forest for wood is like selling a computer chip for the silicon. The real value is the biodiversity (drugs, biofuels, etc).

We are challenged to apply our skills to build a consensus to move forward quickly to solve the climate crisis.