Subject: Taiwanese National Center for High Computing inf

From: tzeng yuan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 May 1993 18:37:14 EST

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From: [email-masked] (Jiunn-Horng Lee)
Subject: Kahaner Report: Taiwan's Nat'l Center for High Performance Computing
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Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 14:53:45 GMT

[ Article crossposted from comp.research.japan,soc.culture.taiwan,comp.sys.super
[ Author was Rick Schlichting ]
[ Posted on 29 Apr 93 04:44:38 GMT ]

  [Dr. David Kahaner is a numerical analyst on sabbatical to the
   Office of Naval Research-Asia (ONR Asia) in Tokyo from NIST.  The
   following is the professional opinion of David Kahaner and in no
   way has the blessing of the US Government or any agency of it.  All
   information is dated and of limited life time.  This disclaimer should
   be noted on ANY attribution.]

  [Copies of previous reports written by Kahaner can be obtained using
   anonymous FTP from host cs.arizona.edu, directory japan/kahaner.reports.]

From:
 Dr. David K. Kahaner
 US Office of Naval Research Asia
 (From outside US):  23-17, 7-chome, Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106 Japan
 (From within  US):  Unit 45002, APO AP 96337-0007
  Tel: +81 3 3401-8924, Fax: +81 3 3403-9670
  Email: [email-masked]
Re: Taiwan's National Center for High Performance Computing
28 April 1993
This file is named "nchc.93"

ABSTRACT. The opening of Taiwan's National Center for High Performance
Computing (NCHC), 19-22 April 1993, HsinChu Taiwan, is described. Also,
brief comments on a visit to Taiwan's Data Communications Institute.

I have written several times about the establishment of a new national
supercomputing center in Taiwan, even before it was built. See for
example, "taiwan12.91" 16 Jan 1992, and "taiwan3.92", 24 April 1992.
Recently, I traveled to the city of HsinChu, about one hour south west
of Taipei to participate in the formal opening of this center and the
associated conference, International High-Performance Computer
Conference (IHCC'93).  Although there are many supercomputers in Asia,
to the best of my knowledge, Taiwan's National Center for High
Performance Computing (NCHC) is the first truly national center in this
part of the world, and for this the Taiwanese science community should
be congratulated.

The National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan is a two
year old effort by the government to promote and develop high
performance computing in Taiwan. It is a Division under the National
Science Council (NSC) which is similar to the National Science
Foundation in the U.S, and in fact Dr. N.H.Kuo, the Chairman of the NSC
gave the opening address. He emphasized the role of the center as a tool
for research, as a balanced resource between academia, government and
industry, and of his expectations that the center will permit Taiwanese
scientists to become more active members of the international community.

    Dr. Nan-Hung Kuo
    Chairman, National Science Council
    Executive Yuan
    19/F, 106, Ho-Ping East Road, Section 2
    Taipei, Taiwan 10636, Republic of China
     Tel: +886 2 737-7500; Fax: +886 2 737-7668

In many ways, NCHC it is similar to a National Science Foundation center
in the US and an important part of the Opening Ceremony was the signing
(by Greg Galvin of Cornell) of an agreement with their sister
organization, the Cornell Theory Center. The main effects of this
agreement are related to information and people sharing, and in fact,
several Taiwanese scientists are slated to spend some months at Cornell
in the near future.

Galvin also gave an interesting talk about new ideas in cooperation
between universities and industries. He commented that in the past have
been either bilateral (a faculty member and corporate person with
similar interests agree to collaborate) or affiliates programs in which
companies pay US$10-50,000 to receive publications, have some faculty
access, and invitations to annual review meetings. In recent years,
however, affiliates have lost some of their appeal, as interaction
between the company and academic organizations has been shown to be
limited, and in any case the information flow is all one way, out of the
university.  More recently a new model of cooperation, a partnership,
has become prevalent, and Galvin felt that it will become the dominant
form of university-industry collaboration in the 1990s.  Typically,
partnerships involve a joint definition of work to be performed, usually
over several years, and often with personnel exchanges in both
directions. He also pointed out the three points of scientific
discovery, technical leadership, and public service that need to be
emphasized, the role of university-industry collaborations in each of
these, and finally, some examples of active collaborations in place at
Cornell today.

In addition to Cornell, NCHC signed an agreement with IBM that opens
that company's research labs and will place 24 Taiwanese scientists at a
variety of three month assignments in these labs during the next two
years.

NSC has funded NCHC for about US$100M over five years.

NCHC's building is newly completed. It has 150K square feet of office
space on four floors and has plenty of space for expansion. Construction
appears to be impressive, with marble flooring almost everywhere, and
very nicely appointed offices. We were told that construction costs were
on the order of US$13M, a figure that seems quite low considering the
size and quality of the building.  The entire building is cabled with
FDDI and is T1 linked to the Universities as part of TANET . With this
connectivity it is hoped that most academic researchers in Taiwan will
be able to reach the NCHC equipment from their own office.

The NCHC is located in the HsinChu Science-Based Industrial Park. This
Industrial Park is also an effort of the Taiwanese government to promote
high technology in Taiwan.  The industrial park was founded 13 years ago
on 1500 acres and now supports about 25,000 workers in 140 companies.
Adjacent to NCHC is an almost commissioned synchrotron radiation source,
the only one in Taiwan.  HsinChu is located about 75 kilometers south of
Taipei along the main north/south highway.

There are currently 65 employees at the NCHC with plans to hire an
additional 10 people within a year. The breakdown of the total number of
employees is:

        Administration                  14
        Research and Promotion          28
        Computer Services               10
        Consultants                     11

The research and promotion staff are charged with promoting and
educating Taiwan about the benefits of High- Performance Computing. They
will also be involved in their own research. All of them have advanced
degrees, about half of them have Ph.D.s from the U.S.

The Consultants are distributed throughout Taiwan with one at each of
the 11 major Universities and Academica Sinica. They help with access to
NCHC, stabilizing TANET (the Taiwan Academic Network), optimizing
programs and training users. In fact, several training courses have
already been given, and there is a plan to allow public school students
to have some exposure to the center equipment during this summer.

The director of the Center is Dr. San-Cheng Chang who is on leave from
the Civil Engineering Department at National Taiwan University (in
Taipei). His deputy director is Mr. Kuo-Wei Wu who had been a long time
employee of Cray Research. Dr. Jin Su is in charge of the division of
Research and Promotion.  Mr Gen-Shen Lin is in charge of the Computer
Services.

Currently, NCHC has:

        IBM ES9000 (5 Processors)
        Convex 3840
        4 HP 735s
        4 IBM RS6000 model 580
        4 IBM RS6000 model 560
        4 SGI Crimsons, 4 SGI 4D/310 and a SGI 4D/35
        Approximately 150 Sun SPARCstation ELC (b/w) workstations.

I reported on the choice of IBM as a major vendor last year. This might
be a little surprising given the experience of several key NCHC staff on
Cray systems, but is mostly a reflection of the fact that there is
already a significant IBM and Convex presence in Taiwan, as well as
very active sales and marketing operations for both these companies.
However, an open procurement was done with at least one Japanese vendor
competing (NEC).

The original NCHC plan, that I described in an earlier report,
anticipated an upgrade to an SS1 machine from Steve Chen's SSI in 1995.
As most readers know, this company had significant financial support
from IBM over several years (the partnership also included DuPont,
Boeing, Electricite de France, and Ford). IBM's commitment to SSI ended
several months ago and IBM chose not to continue their funding. Chen has
attempted to obtain funding from other sources. Mostly this has been
unsuccessful, except for an offer of US$100M over one year from a joint
venture that included at least one organization that was an extension of
the Government of the People's Republic of China.  Ultimately this offer
was withdrawn, and to the best of my knowledge, Chen is now considering
other product possibilities, such as producing a high performance
workstation, etc. In any case, the possibility of a large supercomputer
in 1995 from this source seems remote and NCHC is already thinking about
their upgrading opportunities. They will be looking at the possibility
of parallel computer and also a distributed workstation environment.

During my week at NCHC several of the ELC sparkstations were available
for use for electronic mail via telnet. Access to Tokyo was quite slow
although functional, but somewhat better to the US. However one problem
was a very poor keyboard response on the ELCs, which exhibited a
tremendous amount of key bounce.  I had so much trouble that eventually
I abandoned any attempt to edit files. Most other visitors had similar
difficulties on each the available machines, and this was also confirmed
by Dr. Chang who felt that there was a design problem.  (The ELCs were
offered to NCHC at extremely favorable terms, although I am told that
there is now some effort on the part of at least one other vendor to get
NCHC to trade them in.)

IHCC '93

Associated with NCHC's opening was an exhibit and conference, IHCC'93.
A major goal of this conference was to publicize the NCHC to all Taiwan
researchers in government, academia and industry, and  to increase
communication between researchers and NCHC.  In this regard, it seemed
to me that the organizers were quite successful. The conference had
about 375 attendees for the guest speaker's tutorials. Also there were
21 vendor presentations and 21 vendor exhibits, and these were open to
the public.  There were 450 (including high school students) who
attended these vendor activities.

There were 16 guest speakers invited as experts in their own fields. They
were asked to each give presentations of a survey of their field and then a
more detailed look at their own current interests. The speakers and topics
were:

Jack Dongarra           U of TN & ORNL  Lapack and XNETLIB
Michele Parrinello      IBM             Ab-initio Molecular Dynamics
Hal Alles               SGI             ICs and ASICs
David Kincaid           Univ. Texas     Iterative Methods
Ted Belytschko          Northwestern    Nonlinear Finite Elements
Jan Andzelm             Biosym          Density Functional Methods
Iain Duff               Harwell&Cerfacs Sparse Solvers
John Larson             CSRD            Performance Modeling and Benchmarking
Robert Manchek          Univ. Tenn.     PVM
Arie Kaufman            N.Y.U.          Volume Visualization
William Goddard         MSI             Material Science
Tony Chan               Univ. Hong Kong Parallel PDE Algorithms
Michael Frisch          Gaussian        Electronic Structure Theory
David Keyes             Yale            Parallel CFD
Hans J. Hermann         KFA, Germany    Molecular Dynamics
Joseph Fisher           Hewlett Packard Compiler Technology

Thus, this conference provided the local researchers a chance to hear
and talk with known experts in a wide range of fields. There were no
Taiwanese speakers.

There were two lively panel sessions at night, moderated by Mike Ess of
NCHC.  Their topics were:

        Benchmarking: Art or Science?
        What will be the Computing Center of the Future?

The vendor presentations included the following (I didn't actually get
to all of these, so I cannot attest to the actual participation of all
the people named below).

SGI                                     Practical Parallel Processing
BIOSYM          Jan Andzelm             Quantum Chenistry, software demo
Tripos          Scott A. Gothe          Sybyl 6.0
Convex          Steve Wallach and David Keck    Metacomputing
HP              Joseph Fisher           PA-RISC
nCUBE           Bob Enk                 Forge 90
MSC/NASTRAN     Dr. Hsieh               NASTRAN Applications
DYNATECH        David Byrne             CFD software
DEC             Jeevan Kumaran          Workstation Farms
IBM             Mr. Yu and Mr. Ma       IBM RISC & ES9000
TATUNG          Mr Fan & Mr Cheng       Phoenics & FEA
HO-MEN          Mr Yang & Mr Cheng      Anvil 5000 CAD/CAM
Mentor Graphics Mr Wang                 IC Design Methodology
Abaqus          Mr Ling                 ABAQUS Applications
MSI             Mario Blanco            Polymer and Materials Science

Neither the tutorial speakers nor the vendor sessions contained any
Japanese participation. Mr Wu commented to me that Taiwanese people have
some difficulty understanding the English spoken by Japanese.  (Also, I
was told that Cray Research attempted to participate in the vendor
sessions, but only at a very late date, and it was not possible to
accommodate them.)

The format of the conference was clearly modelled after supercomputing
conferences in the West, with technical sessions, exhibits, and vendor
presentations.

Overall, I felt that just about everything concerning NCHC was smart,
for Taiwan.  There is a clear view that the center will be a focus for
applications of high performance computing, and I sensed no serious
interest in its being a testbed for new architectures or related
activities that did not have research into applications as a theme.
This makes sense given the needs in the country. Similarly, the
conference was a direct effort to bring Western experts to Taiwan to
inform Taiwanese scientists about state of the art research in a broad
collection of technical areas. As part of the opening ceremony, Prof
J.Dongarra (U-Tennessee) announced that NCHC would soon become a NETLIB
distribution center. This means, in effect, that a vast collection of
public domain software will soon be easily available to Taiwanese
scientists via electronic distribution. This is another smart example of
providing technology input to a scientific community anxious for the
information.

It will be most interesting to return to NCHC next year so hear about the
progress made by Taiwanese scientists in making use of high performance
computing for their own research activities.

The address of the NCHC is:
        National Center for High Performance Computing
        P.O. Box 19-136
        HsinChu, Taiwan
         Tel: +886 35-776-085
         Fax: +886 35-776-082

Email addresses of people mentioned in this report:

San-Cheng Chang         [email-masked]
Kuo-Wei Wu              [email-masked]
Jin Su                  [email-masked]
Mike Ess                [email-masked]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

DATA COMMUNICATIONS INSTITUTE (DCI)

[To be added shortly...]

For readers' information, the following statistics about Taiwan may be
of some interest.

Population:                          21M
Pop growth:                         1.2%
GNP/per capita:                 US$ 10,215
GDP growth:                            6.1%
Exports (12 mos):               US$ 82.5B
Current account surplus:        US$  7.9B
Foreign debt:                          0
Inflation CPI                         3.2%
People/telephone                      2.4

----------------------------END OF REPORT-------------------------------

--
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Jiunn-Horng Lee               | E-mail : [email-masked]
Computer Center               |    TEL : (02) 3627734-257
National Taiwan University    |