Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial

An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."

The DOE bit

[StealthyRoid]

I don't know that having one of the machines at Oak Ridge is that big of a deal. One simple explanation is that the NSF is going to share time on the mainframe with the DoE, and in exchange, the DoE foots the energy bills and finds a place to put it. I'd rather have the agencies sharing multi-million dollar computers than buying them and not using them to capacity.

The question is why not IBM?

[siyavash]

The question is why not IBM? Who else can beat it (BlueGene) at that price? Seems like a pretty good deal to me. Although, government procedures are never optimal. Free market works far better and far more efficient.

Re:Blue Gene/P

[Mathinker]

If it's going to be installed in 2011, it's probably anyone's guess.

Might also be a second-generation Roadrunner [ibm.com].

Got a good laugh about someone calling you on astroturfing, somehow I doubt Slashdot posts affect purchasing decisions on supercomputers all that much.

Horrible Writing

[bendodge]

"According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week (a punctuation mark maybe?) the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed(s?) of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."

Come on editors!

This sounds like a simple one to me... who else?

[RobertM1968]

If the government was interested in a machine from a company who has consistently shown it knows how to build these things, then who else would they choose?

IBM has consistently dominated the fastest supercomputer list:

http://www.top500.org/

And as for it's location... why would the government want to keep putting all their eggs in the same basket? Also, it's not like you need a keyboard and mouse and operator directly attached to this machine... so housing it elsewhere in a facility that can house it makes sense.

Sounds more like a bunch of people grumbling that they arent going to have access to what they thought would be their newest toy. In addition, it indicates possible collaboration between the DOE and NSA which should only be a good thing.

So, what are the concerns?

[ShinmaWa]

This is a HORRIBLE article. Forget, for now, that it seems to be a disjointed series of sentences and let's focus on the "concern".

Word of the decision to award the contract to I.B.M. to build a production version of a computer that is now intended for [DARPA] has created widespread concern in the past week among some computer scientists involved in designing and building the nation's high-performance computers. [...] Placing it in Illinois, however, has led to expressions of concern in California and Pennsylvania, where computing laboratories also bid on the contract.

Okay, that's nice. What is this widespread concern? Does it have to do with the bidding process? If so, why? Why does putting it at UIUC make a difference? Maybe the next paragraph will tell us:

The machine will become a magnet for the world's most advanced and challenging scientific research projects... [Exclamations that it's a special machine and an unfortunate comparison with Hubble]

Guess not. Perhaps Horst Simon had something enlightening to say:

"The process needs to be above all suspicion. [...] It's in the interest of the national community that there is not even a cloud of suspicion, and there already is one."

Anything on the nature of this "cloud of suspicion", New York Times?

It will also represent an extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers in the United States. For most of the last two decades, the fastest computers in the United States have been located at either the national laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., or Livermore, Calif.

I thought not.

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[samkass]

I think you hit the nail on the head. Show me a $200M government contract award that WASN'T challenged by the folks who didn't get it...

sour grapes are inevitable, probably

[Quadraginta]

As I recall, the number of NSF-funded supercomputer centers was drastically cut maybe 10 years ago or so, and something like only three emerged intact (NCSA, Pittsburg, and SDSC). I presume those are the "Illinois," "California" and "Pennsylvania" options mentioned in this otherwise utterly clueless piece of journalistic malpractice. Although maybe "California" refers to Livermore or LANL.

That NCSA might win the contract with a proposal that IBM build the machine is about as uncontroversial and "safe" a result as one could possible imagine, given the very long track record each institution has in this area. So I suspect the "widespread concern" is probably widespread concern for somebody's job or research grant. My impression is that the NSF has been steadily decreasing the amount of money it spends on supercomputer projects, because the community of people who think you can do something with a supercomputer that you really can't with a cluster is steadily shrinking. What that means is people in the business are being brutally squeezed as the research money dries up, and some are being squeezed right out of the field. Harsh, and it's not surprising if the harshest thing they say in response -- as life dreams go up in smoke -- is that they aren't sure the NSF was totally "fair" when they awarded the mongo grant to some other center...

The bit about an "extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers" -- a shift toward the scientific side and away from the military -- is so strange a thing for the New York Times to bitch about, with their knee-jerk loathing of all things military, that it's hard not to believe the reporter totally misunderstood Simon's statement (which is probably not much more than him saying Livermore has always had badass computers for designing nukes, and he thinks they still should, notwithstanding the fact that the nuke design business has been a bit slow lately).

Finally, the bit about another computer going to ORNL demonstrates more cluelessness on the part of the reporter. The fact that UT runs ORNL under contract to DOE doesn't prevent the PIs at ORNL from getting NSF grants -- and plenty folks there have them, I believe. I can't see any reason why folks at ORNL couldn't submit a successful proposal for a big computer to the NSF. They do a lot of unique materials research (since they have those great neutron and X-ray sources), and materials research is a good place to do massive simulations.

I wonder who, with what personal axe to grind, submitted this curiously vapid and pointless article to slashdot?

Cinderella gets the slipper

[john82]

The summary is misleading. RTFA. The real issue here as academic prestige via the selection site. This has nothing to do with the selection of IBM. Mascarading under the cloak of "California" and "Pennsylvania", I'd guess we actually have a couple of ugly stepsisters in the form of the supercomputing facilities (and the universities themselves) at UC Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon. They seem to be shocked and somewhat put out that one of them was not selcted (instead of NCSA/UIUC). So the response now is to try and CREATE a "cloud of suspicion" by complaining that there might be a cloud of suspicion.

Harumph! What were they thinking? I mean, how suspicious that someone would put a new supercomputer at someplace called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Obviously there's something wrong with that selection!

Another point to consider, anytime a large contract (in this case a huge one in several respects) gets awarded, Miss Congeniality and Miss Second Runner-up are going to protest. Happens all the time. This go around however the academic community is trying to BS their way through the issue.

Re:The DOE bit

[smittyoneeach]

Clearly you haven't been around the Beltway.
Your little script makes no mention of Service Oriented Architecture.
If you're not buzzword-compliant, how can you be meaningful?