DeepSci

The DOE's INCITE program awarded 1.6bln CPU hours to 69 researchers. With a $400,000,000 pricetag, do you feel taxpayers are making an investment worth the interest on the debt? Taking the government out of the picture makes ten times more computing power available, while reducing costs by 90%.

Follow up:

Do you feel the DOE should decide what research is "cutting-edge", and deny resources to others? We all want nano solar cells and advancements in nuclear power. Never mind that more than a decade has passed since the last US nuclear power plant went online [source].

These federally funded supercomputing projects are great... if you are one of the 69 chosen few that is allowed to use the resource in 2010. But what about the rest of the research community? They have to wait until 2011 and complete extensive grant proposals to get their research done. A million of the hours are going to IBM to develop drivers and software for supercomputers with 10 million processors [source, page 3]. Our government already paid IBM millions to develop and build the machine at Argonne National Laboratory, now the machine is used to help IBM design an even larger monstrosity that only our federal government can afford.

The argument is made that our government must fund programs like this to create American jobs. But when I read the latest jobs newsletter from IBM, it was promoting "hot jobs" in India, China, Brazil, Romania, Argentina, Philippines, Egypt & Vietnam. Did you notice any countries missing from the list? I'm all for a "smarter planet". I just feel there are much smarter ways of achieving it then taxing the working people of the United States to fund a bureaucracy that decides it would be prudent to pay IBM to build a massive computer that the bureaucracy then grants the use of back to IBM to research how to build even larger and more expensive machines.

The INCITE program budget request for 2010's fiscal year is over 400 MILLION dollars [source]. That divides into the 1.6 billion hours and comes out to 25 cents per awarded CPU hour. By comparison, Amazon Web Services charges 8.5 cents an hour for CPU time [source]. That is for a "cloud" resource, and is not "tightly coupled" the way a supercomputer is, but it sure beats waiting another year and hoping for a time allocation in 2011. And we the people are often willing to use our home computers to help with research as well. When volunteer computing like this is used, the cost drops another 10 fold.

If we each took a few minutes and ran one of the research projects on our home computer, for just a week, 10 fold more computing resource would be available to researchers; and we the people can decide which projects are worthy of our support. The University of California at Berkeley as developed the infrastructure that makes it easy for home users to do just that. And DeepSci.com has a service offering making it easy for researchers to utilize such volunteer computing resources.

Our country will be paying interest on the 400 million dollar INCITE funding for the rest of my lifetime. NOT doing the research is not a viable option. Doing research with 10 fold more computing power, at one tenth of the cost is the smart step needed for progress.