This column is an opinion by Kris Rowe, a computational scientist working to get science and engineering applications ready for the next generation of exascale supercomputers. Born and educated in Canada, he has worked at major Canadian and American Universities, as well as two U.S. national laboratories. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
Some of the brightest minds from around the globe have been quietly working on technology that promises to turn the world on its head, but so far Canada has been watching from the sidelines.
While it is unlikely that people will be huddled around their televisions to watch the power to these incredible machines being switched on, the scientific discoveries that follow the debut of exascale computers will change our daily lives in unimaginable ways.
It’s a supercomputer capable of performing more than a billion billion calculations per second — or 1 exaflops.
“Exa” is the metric system prefix for such grandiose numbers, and “flops” is an abbreviation of “floating-point operations per second.”
For comparison, my laptop computer is capable of about 124 gigaflops, or 124 billion calculations per second, which sounds fast.
According to the TOP500 list, today’s fastest supercomputer is Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit, which tops out at a measured 148.6 petaflops — about one million times faster than my laptop.
However, Summit is a mere welterweight relative to an exascale supercomputer, which is more than 60 times faster.
To put that speed in perspective, if you took all the calculations a modern laptop can perform in a single second, and instead did the arithmetic non-stop with pencil and paper at a rate of one calculation per second, it would take roughly 3,932 years to finish.
In a single second, a supercomputer capable of 1 exaflops could do a series of calculations that would take about 31.7 billion years by hand.
GPUs
While colloquially a supercomputer is referred to as a single entity, it is actually composed of thousands of servers — or compute nodes — connected by a dedicated high-speed network.
You might assume that an exascale supercomputer could be built simply by using 60 times more compute nodes than today’s fastest supercomputer; however, the cost, power consumption, and other constraints make this approach nearly impossible.
A supercomputer node packs an enormous amount of number-crunching power. (Argonne National Laboratory)
Fortunately, computer scientists have an ace up their sleeves, known as a GPU accelerator.
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are the professional-grade cousins of the graphics card in your personal computer and are capable of performing arithmetic at a rate of several teraflops (ie. really, really fast). And a feasible route to exascale can be realized by not only making supercomputers larger but also denser.
Sporting six extremely powerful GPUs per compute node, Argonne National Laboratory’sAurora will follow this approach. Scheduled to come online in 2021, Aurora will be the first exascale supercomputer in North America — although the title of first in the world may go to China’s Tianhe-3, which is slated to power up sometime in 2020.
Several other machines in the U.S., China, Europe and Japan are scheduled to be brought to life soon after Aurora, using similar architectures
What exactly does one do with all that computing power? Change the world, of course.
Exascale supercomputers will allow researchers to tackle problems which were impossible to simulate using the previous generation of machines, due to the massive amounts of data and calculations involved.
An artist’s rendering of the Aurora exascale supercomputer, scheduled to come online in 2021. (Argonne National Laboratory)
Exascale and Canada
So why isn’t Canada building one?
One reason is that exascale supercomputers come with a pretty steep sticker price. The contracts for the American machines are worth more than $500 million US each. On the other side of the Atlantic, the EU signed off on €1 billion for their own exascale supercomputer.
While the U.S. and Europe have much larger populations, the annual per capita spending on large-scale computing projects demonstrates how much Canada is lagging in terms of investment. The U.S. DOE alone will spend close to $1 billion US on its national supercomputing facilities next year, a number which does not take into account spending by other federal organizations, such as the U.S. National Science Foundation.
In comparison, Compute Canada — the national advanced research computing consortium providing supercomputing infrastructure to Canadian researchers — has a budget that is closer to $114 million Cdn.
In its 2018 budget submission, Compute Canada clearly lays out what it will take to bring our country closer to the forefront of supercomputing on the world stage. Included is the need for increasing the annual national spending on advanced research computing infrastructure to an estimated $151 million — a 32 per cent increase from where it is now. Given cost of the American exascale supercomputers, this is likely a conservative estimate.
However, the need for an exascale supercomputer in Canada does not seem to be on the radar of the decision-makers in the federal and provincial governments.
Hanlon’s razor would suggest that this is not due to some sinister plot by politicians to punish the nation’s computer geeks; rather, our politicians likely don’t fully understand the benefits of investing in the technology.
For example, the recent announcement by the premiers of Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick to collaborate on aggressively developing Canada’s small modular reactor (SMR) technology failed to mention the need for advanced computing resources. In contrast, corresponding U.S. DOE projects explicitly state that they will require exascale computing resources to meet their objectives.
This visualization, part of an extremely complex simulation of a Large Hadron Collider event, was done using existing supercomputing resources at Argonne National Laboratory. Aurora will be capable of even more complex computational jobs. (Taylor Childers/Argonne National Laboratory)
Why should the Canadian government — and you — care?
For the less altruistic, a benefit of supercomputing research is “trickle-down electronics.” The quiet but persistent legacy of the space race is technology like the microwave oven found in most kitchens. Similarly, the technological advances necessary to achieve exascale computing will also lead to lower-cost and more energy-efficient laptops, improved high-definition computer graphics, and prevalent AI in our connected devices.
But more importantly for Canada, how we invest our federal dollars says a lot about what we value as a nation.
It’s a statement about how we value the sciences. Do we want to attract world-class researchers to our universities? Do we want Canada to be a leader in climate research, renewable energy and medical advances?
It’s also a statement about how much we value Canadian businesses and innovation.
The user-facility model of the U.S. DOE provides businesses with access to singular resources, which gives American companies a competitive advantage in the world marketplace. Compute Canada has a similar mandate, and given the large number of startup companies and emerging industries in Canada, we leave our economy on an unequal footing without significant investments in advanced computing infrastructure.
Ultimately, supercomputers are apolitical: they can just as easily be used for oil exploration as wind farming. Their benefits can be applied across the economy and throughout society to develop new products and solve problems.
At a time when Canada seems so divided, building an exascale computer is the kind of project we need to bring the country together.
[Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy or the U.S. government.]
This column is part of CBC’s Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read our FAQ.
TORONTO – Unifor says workers at a Walmart warehouse in Mississauga, Ont., have voted to join the union.
The union says it’s Walmart’s first warehouse to unionize in Canada.
Unifor national president Lana Payne says the employees stood up for their rights and the union is excited to get to work on their first collective agreement.
Unifor’s campaign at Walmart’s facility began in December 2023.
The vote was held from Sept. 10 to 12.
Unifor represents 315,000 workers across the country.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
The Canadian government says it will donate up to 200,000 vaccine doses to fight the mpox outbreak in Congo and other African countries.
It says the donated doses of Imvamune will come from Canada’s existing supply and will not affect the country’s preparedness for mpox cases in this country.
Minister of Health Mark Holland says the donation “will help to protect those in the most affected regions of Africa and will help prevent further spread of the virus.”
Dr. Madhukar Pai, Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health, says although the donation is welcome, it is a very small portion of the estimated 10 million vaccine doses needed to control the outbreak.
Vaccine donations from wealthier countries have only recently started arriving in Africa, almost a month after the World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
A few days after the declaration in August, Global Affairs Canada announced a contribution of $1 million for mpox surveillance, diagnostic tools, research and community awareness in Africa.
On Thursday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said mpox is still on the rise and that testing rates are “insufficient” across the continent.
Jason Kindrachuk, Canada research chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, said donating vaccines, in addition to supporting surveillance and diagnostic tests, is “massively important.”
But Kindrachuk, who has worked on the ground in Congo during the epidemic, also said that the international response to the mpox outbreak is “better late than never (but) better never late.”
“It would have been fantastic for us globally to not be in this position by having provided doses a much, much longer time prior than when we are,” he said, noting that the outbreak of clade I mpox in Congo started in early 2023.
Clade II mpox, endemic in regions of West Africa, came to the world’s attention even earlier — in 2022 — as that strain of virus spread to other countries, including Canada.
Two doses are recommended for mpox vaccination, so the donation may only benefit 100,000 people, Pai said.
Pai questioned whether Canada is contributing enough, as the federal government hasn’t said what percentage of its mpox vaccine stockpile it is donating.
“Small donations are simply not going to help end this crisis. We need to show greater solidarity and support,” he said in an email.
“That is the biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic — our collective safety is tied with that of other nations.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
MONTREAL – A 20-year-old man arrested over an alleged Islamic State terror plot to kill Jews in New York City will return to court in December in Montreal.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a Pakistani national living in Ontario, was arrested last week in Ormstown, Que., allegedly on his way across the border into New York state.
Khan has been charged in the United States with one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to a terrorist organization, and officials are seeking to have him extradited to stand trial.
He was not present for a hearing today in Quebec Superior Court, where lawyers said they are waiting for extradition documents and for authorization from Canadian officials before proceeding in the case, which will return before a judge on Dec. 6.
U.S. authorities allege that Khan, also known as Shahzeb Jadoon, intended to use “automatic and semi-automatic weapons” in a mass shooting at a Jewish centre in Brooklyn around Oct. 7, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
Authorities allege he began planning his attack in November 2023.
Earlier this week, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Khan arrived in Canada in June 2023 on a student visa.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
