Introduction: “Dr. Henry Neeman is the Director of the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research and an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma. . . . In addition to his own teaching and research, Dr. Neeman collaborates with dozens of research groups, applying High Performance Computing techniques in fields such as numerical weather prediction, bioinformatics and genomics, data mining, high energy physics, astronomy, nanotechnology, petroleum reservoir management, river basin modeling and engineering optimization. . . . Dr. Neeman’s research interests include high performance computing, scientific computing, parallel and distributed computing and computer science education” (Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium 2011).N

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Educational Technology and Change JournalSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry NeemanPosted on March 28, 2011 by JimS(http://etcjournal.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/bonnie-bracey-sutton/)By Bonnie BraceySutton (http://etcjournal.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/bonnie-bracey-sutton/)Editor, Policy IssuesIntroduction: “Dr. Henry Neeman (http://hneeman.oscer.ou.edu/) is the Director of theOU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (http://www.oscer.ou.edu/) and anadjunct assistant professor in the School of Computer Science (http://www.cs.ou.edu/) at theUniversity of Oklahoma (http://www.ou.edu/). . . . In addition to his own teaching and research, Dr.Neeman collaborates with dozens of research groups, applying High Performance Computingtechniques in fields such as numerical weather prediction, bioinformatics and genomics, data mining,high energy physics, astronomy, nanotechnology, petroleum reservoir management, river basinmodeling and engineering optimization. . . . Dr. Neeman’s research interests include high performancecomputing, scientific computing, parallel and distributed computing and computer science education”(Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium 2011 (http://www.webcitation.org/5xXSxHdDy)).(http://hneeman.oscer.ou.edu/)ETCJ: In plain English, what is Supercomputing (SC)?Henry Neeman: Supercomputing is the biggest, fastest computing in the world right this minute, andlikewise a supercomputer is one of the biggest, fastest computers right this minute. The reason we say“right this minute” is that computers are always getting bigger and faster, so if something is asupercomputer today, it won’t be a supercomputer a few years from now. In fact, the biggest fastestsupercomputer of 15 years ago would be a laptop today, and the biggest fastest computer of 25 years agoSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/1 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PMwould be a cell phone today. Here’s an example: In 2002, OU got our first big cluster supercomputer. Itcould do slightly over a trillion calculations per second, which made it one of the fastest supercomputersin the world. It took up 132 square feet of floor space, weighed 5 tons, and cost almost a million dollars.Today, that same computing speed can be had in two graphics cards — and next year, it’ll be less thanone.Often, supercomputing is used for Computational Science, or more broadly Computational andData-Enabled Science and Engineering (CDESE), which is the use of computing to conduct experiments.Sometimes CDESE is used for understanding results observed in the real world, but often it’s used tostudy phenomena that are too big (like a galaxy), too small (like an atom), too slow (like the entirelifetime of the universe), too fast (like collisions of subatomic particles), too expensive (testing dozens ofairplane prototypes to build one new product) or just plain too dangerous (running around inside atornado) to do in the real world.ETCJ: How is SC being used by “scientists and engineers with modest computing experience”?HN: Many science and engineering researchers are very sophisticated about their area of research, butnot very sophisticated about computing, especially large scale computing. At OU, we teach them thebasic concepts of supercomputing, then sit down with them and help them do with our supercomputerthe work that they need to do. More often than not, that just means helping them to download a free“community code” off the web, install it and get it up and running to do their research with. Butsometimes it means helping them to write software, or to modify software to be able to run on asupercomputer. Either way, our goal is to make them productive as quickly as possible.ETCJ: Is SC being used by K-12 and college-level educators to conduct research in teaching and learning? If yes,can you share some examples?HN: In fact, there’s a new online journal about teaching supercomputing, the Journal of ComputationalScience Education (http://www.jocse.org/). And there are a number of organizations focused on researchin both the teaching of supercomputing and CDESE, and the use of supercomputing and CDESE inteaching. Probably the world leader in both of these is the Shodor Education Foundation(http://www.shodor.org). They’ve been both doing this and studying it for over a decade.ETCJ: Tell us about OU’s Condor pool, or massive grid of PCs. How is this being used by researchers? Can otherschools and colleges create similar pools and how might they be used by educators and students?HN: OU Information Technology manages a good number of PC labs all over campus — in the library,the residence halls, the Union, various departments — that collectively add up to about 800 PCs. Whenthose PCs are idle — which in practice is about 80% of the time — they’re available for researchers to donumber crunching on. The biggest consumer of our Condor pool is our High Energy Physics group, theones who are banging tiny particles together at unbelievably high speed. But we make the Condor poolavailable to anyone at OU who wants it. Recently, we had a grad student do a project where he had torun his software 60,000 times. Doing that on his desktop, that would have taken years, maybe decades;on the Condor pool, it was a matter of a few weeks. Anyone can start a Condor pool of their own; youcan run it on just a single PC or on thousands. And all the software is free.ETCJ: Tell us about your NSF project, “Oklahoma Optical Initiative.”HN: The Oklahoma Optical Initiative (OCII, pronounced “Okie”) is a project funded by the NationalScience Foundation’s Inter-Campus and Intra-Campus Cyber Connectivity program. It’s a collaborationSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/2 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PMamong OU, Oklahoma State U, U Tulsa, Langston U and the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation. It hasfour pieces to it:Transforming Oklahoma’s statewide ring to the latest high end optical hardware, which will allowOklahoma institutions to run dedicated circuits across the state at minimal cost and labor.1. Upgrading the connectivity at several Oklahoma institutions, with improvements varying from afactor of 5 to a factor of 100, at OU (10 times increase), Oklahoma State U (10 times increase), U Tulsa(5 times increase), Langston U (100 times increase for Oklahoma’s only Historically Black University)and the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation (22 times increase), a nonprofit research foundation inrural Oklahoma. We’re also doing improvements to some rural communities and to some Tribalcolleges. Lately we’ve been working closely with the College of the Muscogee Nation in Okmulgee.2. The Oklahoma Telepresence Initiative, where we’re providing telepresence capability to institutionsacross Oklahoma.3. The Oklahoma Networking Mentorship Program, where we’re providing workforce development toinstitutions across Oklahoma. Specifically, we’re providing to networking courses at institutionsacross the state presentations from networking professionals, talking about what it’s like to donetworking for a living. And, we provide job shadowing opportunities so they can see it up close. Wedo this at PhD-granting, masters-granting, bachelors-granting institutions, community colleges,career techs, and even a high school. And many of these institutions have high populations ofunderrepresented minorities — this is a great way to reach an audience that often doesn’t getexposed to the cutting edge. The ONMP has been so well received that, on the urging of our externalevaluators, we’re expanding the ONMP to the OITMP, covering other areas of InformationTechnology. This semester, we’ve expanded to include security as well, and we’ll add more areas ofIT as we move forward.4. ETCJ: What is CI, or the Cyberinfrastructure Initiative?HN: The Oklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative is an agreement between OU and Oklahoma State Uto help everyone in the state learn to use Cyberinfrastructure (supercomputing, high performancenetworking, CDESE and so on) by providing our centrally owned Cyberinfrastructure resources toinstitutions statewide, not just academic but government, nonprofit and even commercial — and formost of them, it’s free. It includes not only our resources but also our services, especially“Supercomputing in Plain English (http://www.oscer.ou.edu/education/),” our very successfulsupercomputing education endeavor, and the Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium(http://symposium.oscer.ou.edu/).ETCJ: Tell us more about the “new class of HPC users who aren’t experts in high performance computing, but areable to generate results that rival those of an expert.” In the future, will SC be a resource that’s available to thegeneral public? How will people, in general, use SC in their everyday lives and pursuits?HN: You may not see the supercomputers, but every single day supercomputing is making our livesbetter. Everything from the cars we drive to the weather forecast on TV to the movies we watch to thedetergent bottles in our laundry rooms are made, or made better, by supercomputing. Today, there are anumber of ways for citizens to access supercomputing. Often, these are known as “science gateways,”and they provide a simple interface to a complicated back end. An example is nanoHUB(http://nanohub.org/), which K-12 and postsecondary students can use to do nanotechnologysimulations. In fact, the nanoHUB website has curricula and teaching materials that any teacher can putto work in their classroom.ETCJ: In the future, how will SCs change the educational landscape? That is, how will it change teaching andSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/3 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PMlearning?HN: Teachers will have ways to not just show students phenomena that they previously couldn’t studyin a classroom, but to have their students experiment with it.ETCJ: Are schools and colleges doing enough to educate students about computers? If not, what more needs to bedone?HN: Ironically, the more ubiquitous and usable computers become, the less urgency people feel aboutlearning about computing. And, as testing has become an increasing focus of schools nationwide,subjects outside the tests have fallen off the radar. So it’s no surprise that Computer Science has becomeless common in the classroom. At the same time, schools are increasingly discovering the value ofcomputers in teaching their core subject matter. It may be that the best way to attract students intocomputing careers is to have them using computing everywhere.ETCJ: In the future, how will SCs change social networking?HN: Social networking services, both by accident and by design, collect mountains, oceans of data. Andit turns out that all this data can be incredibly valuable. A recent article (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1897860&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=14095534&CFTOKEN=95124460) inCommunications of the Association for Computing Machinery highlighted the mining of Twitter data —Tweets — to track flu outbreaks. Like other companies, social networks are discovering the value ofsupercomputing in discovering hidden patterns in the data they’ve collected.ETCJ: Will SCs play a role in finding cures for cancer? Bringing about world peace? Improving education?Reducing poverty?HN: All of the above, and in fact it’s already being used in all of these areas. Take cancer, for example;much of what’s happening in oncology research today is what are collectively called “the omics”:genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and so on. These are large scale data mining problems, looking forpatterns in big data collections that show how various genetic, protein and metabolism phenomena leadto structures that cause diseases like cancer. World peace is, in an odd way, one of the oldestsupercomputing applications. Specifically, the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the USDepartment of Energy, was one of the earliest adopters of supercomputing, as a means of simulatingnuclear explosions, especially after the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Since we can’t blow upour bombs, we test them virtually, via supercomputing. That way, both we and our rivals haveconfidence that an attack on us really would be the end of the world — so no one tries. For reducingpoverty, supercomputing is increasingly important in the social sciences, especially in economics, wherewe’re learning more and more about how economies work in the real world, both by runningsimulations and by data mining.ETCJ: Tell us about your passion for ballroom dancing.HN: I got into ballroom dancing in grad school, for all the wrong reasons — namely, to meet girls. But Idiscovered that I loved it, a lot, and by my third semester I was already teaching it. I’ve been dancing for22 years and teaching it for 20, and I still love both. In fact, my wife and I teach ballroom dancing twice aweek and go social dancing most weekends. With two little kids at home, it’s pretty much the onlyhobby time we have time for.ETCJ: Anything else you’d like to tell us that we haven’t covered?Supercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/4 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PMHN: Nah, you hit the high points.Filed under: Uncategorized« Measuring the Quality of Online Programs: We Still Don’t Have Guidelines Computational Thinking,Computational Science and High Performance Computing in K-12 Education: White Paper on 21stCentury Education »10 ResponsesClaude Almansi, on March 28, 2011 at 10:28 pm said:This is fascinating, but – due to my ignorance of computing – there are a few things I don’t quiteunderstand:– Cluster computer v. grid of computers: do they both involve harnessing the power of severalcomputers?– If so, do the 2 different terms indicate a difference i the way the individual computers are linked?And perhaps off-topic, but there seems to be an analogy: in his The Birth of the Word March 2011TED conference, Deb Roy explains how his MIT team used the MIT computer to analyze years ofvideos taken by webcams in his home to track how his son started using words, according to whatinteractions with his parents and nanny.And in the second part, he explains how his team then applied the same analyzing tools to TVbroadcasts and reactions to them in social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This must need a verypowerful computer, but is it one that works like the one at University of Oklahoma?ReplyHenry Neeman, on March 29, 2011 at 4:15 am said:Both cluster computers and grids involve harnessing the power of several computers, but indifferent ways. Roughly speaking, think of a cluster as local — typically a cluster will have adedicated internal network that isn’t accessible from outside the cluster — while grids are morebroadly distributed, communicating over wide area (and often commodity) networks.In practice, this means that clusters and grids are used for different things. Grids are good for“loosely coupled” applications, where the various pieces can advance independently of oneanother; a classic example is Monte Carlo simulation, where a phenomenon is studied byrandomly generating many examples of a phenomenon and then finding the average of theirproperties. Clusters are great for “tightly coupled” problems, where all of the pieces have toadvance in lockstep; a good example is weather forecasting, where the weather at the easternedge of Oklahoma has to line up, not just in space but in time, with the weather at the westernedge of Arkansas.With respect to Deb Roy’s discussion, while I’m not familiar with the specific example, itSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/5 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PMwouldn’t surprise me if he used a large group of computers to mine his 90,000 hours of videodata and 140,000 hours of audio data, because if he had that much data, then analyzing one file ata time would take much much longer than analyzing many of them at the same time. Whetherthat was on a cluster, a grid or just a roomful of laptops, I couldn’t say — but in principle all thosesolutions would have roughly the same outcome, a huge decrease in runtime in the real world,and therefore a huge increase in the practicality of the project.ReplyClaude Almansi, on March 29, 2011 at 9:06 am said:Thank you for the very clear explanation, Professor Neeman.ReplyInterview: Henry Neeman on Supercomputing in Education | insideHPC.com, on March 29, 2011at 12:58 am said:[…] this interview from the Education Technology & Change blog, Henry Neeman from theUniversity of Oklahoma […]ReplyBonnie Bracey Sutton, on March 29, 2011 at 4:08 am said:Henry has helped us in K-12 by coming to conferences and sharing his knowledge. I would say he isout of the silo ..Replybusiness review, on April 8, 2011 at 10:16 am said:Companies were shifting from large mini-computers to small and powerful micro-computers andmany people realized that this would lead to a large-scale waste of computing power as computingresources were being fragmented more and more. However the same organizations also face hugecomputation-intensive problems and thus require great computing power to remain competitivehence the stable demand for supercomputing solutions that largely are built on cluster computingconcepts. Many vendors offer commercial cluster computing solutions.ReplyTwo Americas, Two Ways of Thinking About Education?And Technology? « The Power of Us, onSeptember 9, 2011 at 11:34 am said:[…] Henry Neeman  and Scott Lathrop who chairs the Supercomputing Conference reach out to helpcreate a […]ReplyTransforming Education, Broadening Engagement , Supercomputing and K-12 Mentors | SITEBlog, on November 15, 2011 at 5:31 am said:[…] year we have found a few others to bring along on our journey. No one is in charge of the team. Henry Neeman and Scott Lathrop are our main contacts within the SC […]ReplyIs America Really a Digitally Literate Nation? Do People Really Understand Inequity?SocialSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/6 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PMJustice? | The Power of Us, on March 8, 2013 at 3:53 am said:[…] this interview from the Education Technology & Change blog, Henry Neeman from theUniversity of Oklahoma […]ReplyIs America Really a Digitally Literate Nation? | SITE Blog, on March 10, 2013 at 4:40 pm said:[…] this interview from the Education Technology & Change blog, Henry Neeman from theUniversity of Oklahoma […]ReplyBlog at WordPress.com. The Digg 3 Column Theme. FollowFollow “Educational Technology and Change Journal”Build a website with WordPress.comSupercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman | Educational ... http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/28/7824/7 of 7 9/4/15, 3:52 PM

Supercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman

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Supercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman

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