Speaker 1: And you know a question and often here's why would
Speaker 1: anybody need to compute that fast? There's lots of problems
Speaker 1: where you have to compute that fast. If you ever
Speaker 1: want to get an answer from Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: it's the big take. I'm West Cassova today a trip
Speaker 1: to see the world's fastest computer. We did a whole
Speaker 1: lot of COVID work, how the virus makes people are
Speaker 1: really really sick, looking at solving multiphysics problems related to
Speaker 1: the modeling and simulation of nuclear reactors, much more complicated
Speaker 1: mechanistic models of what's going on in opioord's addiction. One
Speaker 1: problem that requires a lot of flops, a lot of
Speaker 1: floating point operations per second. Is climate modeling or weather
Speaker 1: model really trying to crack hard problems? And so we
Speaker 1: need this combination of clever rhythm designed with exoscale computing
Speaker 1: to start to solve the challenges and biology and ecosystems. Hey, Vicky,
Speaker 1: Hey Catherine, Hey, how's it going. Hello Wes, So what
Speaker 1: are we talking about today? Well, I came across these
Speaker 1: incredible photos in BusinessWeek a bit ago, and they were
Speaker 1: reporting on the world's largest supercomputer in fact, it's linked
Speaker 1: to our write up today. So the piece talked about
Speaker 1: the sheer computing power of this mega computer and it
Speaker 1: breaking something called the exoscale barrier. We're going to get
Speaker 1: into that. But my eyes popped and I took it
Speaker 1: to you and Catherine. Remember, oh, yes, I remember this.
Speaker 1: You were very excited, and so where were we and
Speaker 1: so we all decided that you and Catherine needed to
Speaker 1: take a road trip, and we did so. This computer
Speaker 1: is called Frontier. It was built at the Department of
Speaker 1: Energies oak Ridge National Lab, which is just outside Knoxville, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: We reached out to them and they said, come check
Speaker 1: it out. So we packed up our audio gear and
Speaker 1: we went and we got to speak to some of
Speaker 1: the engineers and scientists who are using the supercomputer right
Speaker 1: now for a myriad of projects. Yeah, and we really
Speaker 1: can't stress enough how incredibly powerful this thing is. They're
Speaker 1: looking at questions that they were unable to answer ever before,
Speaker 1: like the origins of the universe, like potential cures for disease,
Speaker 1: and these kinds of questions actually really need a massive
Speaker 1: amount of computing power, and they haven't been able to
Speaker 1: do it up to now. Exoscale is like a next level.
Speaker 1: So scientists are lining up out the door to use
Speaker 1: this thing. So we went down and we took a tour.
Speaker 1: I'm justin Wit and I am the program director for
Speaker 1: the Leadership Computing Facility here at a Christian National Lab.
Speaker 1: We're housing some of the fastest and most powerful supercomputers
Speaker 1: in the world. We currently are deploying the world's fastest computer,
Speaker 1: the Frontier system, and we all have just down the
Speaker 1: hall the Summit Supercomputer, which is at number five currently,
Speaker 1: I believe. All right, so we've established that this thing
Speaker 1: is fast. But what is fast? Like? How fast are
Speaker 1: we talking about? Yeah, we had the same question, and
Speaker 1: so we put it to him. Can you describe it
Speaker 1: a little bit like what has gone into it? How
Speaker 1: big is it? How fast is it? Yeah? Sure, So
Speaker 1: we'll start with fast. You know, that's what Frontier is
Speaker 1: known for as being the fastest computer in the world
Speaker 1: at this point, and it's capable of about one point
Speaker 1: six quintillion calculations a second. That's one point six times
Speaker 1: with eighteen zeros after it. When numbers get that big,
Speaker 1: that they start to lose meaning, right, you can't your
Speaker 1: mind can't grasp that, and one of the things we
Speaker 1: like to compare it to is if every person on
Speaker 1: the planet could do one calculation per second, it would
Speaker 1: take four years for them to do all the calculations
Speaker 1: that Frontier does every second of the day. I think
Speaker 1: the engineering that went into the room itself is pretty astounding.
Speaker 1: For instance, there is so much computing capacity inside each
Speaker 1: cabinet of Frontier. And when I say cabinet, they're about
Speaker 1: seventy four of these refrigerator sized objects, and each of
Speaker 1: those makes up part of Frontier, and they're packed full
Speaker 1: of computing hardware, and each of those is very heavy.
Speaker 1: At this density, each cabinet weighs about as much as
Speaker 1: two f one fifty pickups And we have seventy four
Speaker 1: of those, plus supporting infrastructure, plus the file system and
Speaker 1: all we're supporting about two Bowling seven forty seven's on
Speaker 1: our raised data center floor at this point, so that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of engineering that went into that to
Speaker 1: make that happen. That image of each of those seventy
Speaker 1: four cabinets weighing as much as two f one fifty
Speaker 1: pickup trucks is like sticking in my head. How do
Speaker 1: you power something that big? This is a really complicated system,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to let the experts explain. So this part,
Speaker 1: I think is a little likely. Behind the scenes store
Speaker 1: of Disney, a lot of people think, oh, do you
Speaker 1: you know I like at home, I order a computer,
Speaker 1: it comes, we plug it into the wall. But with
Speaker 1: computers of the size. For instance, we installed about forty
Speaker 1: megawatts of power to run this computers, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of peak operating. It would use about thirty megawatts of
Speaker 1: that and that's enough to power about twenty five thousand homes.
Speaker 1: And what you hear are actually these very large pumps
Speaker 1: pumping that six thousand gallons of water to the system
Speaker 1: every minute. I just got to cut in here and say,
Speaker 1: that's six thousand gallons. He's talking about one. They're in
Speaker 1: a closed loop system, so it's the same water being
Speaker 1: repurposed over and over again. But they are flowing through
Speaker 1: thirty six inch pipes. We're talking like a yard across.
Speaker 1: Tell us about that the six thousand gallons. That is
Speaker 1: just to keep it cool. That is to keep it cool.
Speaker 1: If you put that much power in, you've got to
Speaker 1: get the heat back out, and in those small spaces,
Speaker 1: really the only way to do that is by circulating
Speaker 1: some fluid directly over each of the components on the
Speaker 1: computer to have your own sort of miniature energy grid here,
Speaker 1: or how do you power this? So we're actually power
Speaker 1: from separate substations here, so if one goes down, we
Speaker 1: still get power to the computer and the mechanical plants.
Speaker 1: You'd think that the world's fastest supercomputer would be I
Speaker 1: don't know, immortal, or at least have a long lifespan,
Speaker 1: but we found out that it's actually not all that
Speaker 1: different from the computers we use. So what we like
Speaker 1: to do is run the computer's in production with scientific
Speaker 1: users on the systems doing their work for you know,
Speaker 1: at least five years, and then we like to overlap
Speaker 1: a year with the next computer, so you know, we
Speaker 1: kind of say five to seven years. It's kind of
Speaker 1: the general timeframe we'd like to keep these around. So
Speaker 1: while we were on the tour, there was one point
Speaker 1: where a technician had one of these huge cabinets open
Speaker 1: and he was sort of messing with the guts of it.
Speaker 1: So we got to see inside of it and we
Speaker 1: see all these microtrips and copper and wiring, and it
Speaker 1: sort of got us thinking how do you build this thing.
Speaker 1: We've all experienced the supply chain issues we've had over
Speaker 1: the last couple of years, especially due to COVID and
Speaker 1: building a supercomputer. It doesn't matter if you're the Department
Speaker 1: of Energy, you're going to run into the same supply issues.
Speaker 1: So we asked them how it was for them. We
Speaker 1: jokingly say, one of our biggest lessons learned is don't
Speaker 1: build a supercomputer during a pandemic. So the supply chain
Speaker 1: issues were non trivial and we're hard to overcome. Frontier
Speaker 1: has sixty million individual parts in it, you know that
Speaker 1: balls down to hundreds of individual part numbers, and the
Speaker 1: supply chain issues were across the board. I guess it
Speaker 1: was early twenty twenty we got word from Hewlett Packard
Speaker 1: Enterprises that their suppliers were saying, this could be a
Speaker 1: two year delay. We cannot get chips to do that
Speaker 1: for us. We had some supply chain issues there, but
Speaker 1: it was even the fifty cent parks, the little voltage
Speaker 1: regulators and things that are in here. And at one
Speaker 1: point we had eighteen people that their full time jobs
Speaker 1: were every day going out and finding the parts to
Speaker 1: build Frontier, and so we shrunk that two year delay
Speaker 1: down to less than a three month delay. We're able
Speaker 1: to mostly hold our schedule for this. But again, so
Speaker 1: they got it built and my next question was what's
Speaker 1: it like to use it? I asked Bronson Messer, he
Speaker 1: was another Oakridge scientist who was also along for the tour. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For the most part, you set at your own workstation
Speaker 1: and you log into Frontier remotely. Almost all of our users,
Speaker 1: with some notable exceptions, are not local. In fact, we
Speaker 1: have a lot of international users. Users all over the
Speaker 1: country everywhere. I have students that, for example, don't interact
Speaker 1: with the computer any other way except something called a
Speaker 1: Jupiter notebook, which is actually a web interface to the computer,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of everything in between. More from oak
Speaker 1: Ridge National Lab when we come back, Vicky, you mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier that scientists are lining up to use the saying
Speaker 1: you can see why. How do they decide though, which
Speaker 1: scientists get time on this computer? And then once they
Speaker 1: get the time, what do they actually use it for.
Speaker 1: Remember Bronson Messer from earlier, he is actually the director
Speaker 1: of science for the oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. That's
Speaker 1: where we were within this massive complex, and we had
Speaker 1: a chance to sit down and ask him. You are
Speaker 1: the go guy, right, You're the guy who says yes
Speaker 1: or no to the project. So how do you vet these?
Speaker 1: Like all peer reviewed science, we use peer review pounds, right,
Speaker 1: So we have several different competitive allocation programs for the machine.
Speaker 1: You know, some of them are open to everybody, some
Speaker 1: are open mostly to DOE researchers. We also reserve a
Speaker 1: small amount of time for what we call our director's
Speaker 1: discretionary program. But for all these programs, we impanel other
Speaker 1: scientists to sort of decide, yeah, this is an important
Speaker 1: scientific problem and we need to use the resources to
Speaker 1: do this first, or you know, maybe this is important too,
Speaker 1: but maybe we should wait just a minute. So those
Speaker 1: same proposals get checked out. And basically the question is
Speaker 1: can they use the big computer and do they need
Speaker 1: to use the big computer? And if you can't answer
Speaker 1: both of those without resounding yes, you probably, frankly, you
Speaker 1: probably don't want to try to compute on our big
Speaker 1: computer because it's it's hard for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1: Inventing all of these there has to be a certain
Speaker 1: amount of national security implications. We don't do any classified
Speaker 1: work here, so we're strictly an open science shop that
Speaker 1: it will see if so, tell me what that means.
Speaker 1: It means that all the all the science that we do,
Speaker 1: basically all the inputs and all the outputs can be
Speaker 1: published in the open literature and be promulgated to anybody.
Speaker 1: So in a journal publication, we do have the ability
Speaker 1: to do things that are a little bit more sensitive
Speaker 1: than just strictly open science, things like protected health information
Speaker 1: or other things like that. But we take that security
Speaker 1: measures really seriously. But what it boils down to is
Speaker 1: we do what's called an exploit control review on every
Speaker 1: single project that gets on the machine. We make sure
Speaker 1: that it's possible that these the results can be can
Speaker 1: be promulgated to everybody. How concerned are you all about
Speaker 1: breach of security or hackers and what kinds of safeguards
Speaker 1: do you have against that. We have a huge cybersecurity
Speaker 1: cred So if you've met, if you fielded the world's
Speaker 1: largest computer for at this point more than a decade,
Speaker 1: we have script kitties knocking at the door every five
Speaker 1: or six seconds. What's a script kitty? Somebody who wants
Speaker 1: to break into the computer for nefarious purposes, Either either
Speaker 1: organized nefarious purposes or just hey, I has hacked into
Speaker 1: the world's largest supercomputer kind of right, Yeah, so we
Speaker 1: have we have huge effort and intrusion detection making sure
Speaker 1: that the edge of our computer is protected from that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Um. And just to back up a
Speaker 1: little bit, why is it called the Frontier? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it really I think Frontiers an optimist named for
Speaker 1: the machine. It's it's the culmination of a more than
Speaker 1: decade long project to get us to the exo scale.
Speaker 1: More than a decade ago, the federal government basically made
Speaker 1: a commitment to getting us to the exo scale as
Speaker 1: as a concrete sort of flag that we could When
Speaker 1: you say the federal government, is that Congress was it
Speaker 1: legislated everybody. It was a whole of government effort, right,
Speaker 1: And of course it took getting Congress behind it because
Speaker 1: they controlled the first strings and it costs money. And
Speaker 1: so there's really two major components of getting us here.
Speaker 1: There's this machine and other machines like it, but this
Speaker 1: machine first, and then alongside of that there's there was
Speaker 1: something called the Exo Scale Computing Project, which was really
Speaker 1: concerned with making sure that we had software and codes
Speaker 1: that could actually take advantage of the machines once they
Speaker 1: got here. That was a big worry, say seven years ago,
Speaker 1: that we would build it and nobody would come and
Speaker 1: nobody could come right because they wouldn't be ready. One
Speaker 1: problem that requires a lot of flops, a lot of
Speaker 1: floating point operations per seconds. Climate modeling or weather modeling. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing about weather modeling is you kind of have
Speaker 1: to get an answer before the weather actually happens, or
Speaker 1: it's not super useful, right, and so weather codes typically
Speaker 1: want to be able to get answers within just a
Speaker 1: few hours or maybe even sub hour in some cases.
Speaker 1: To be able to do that and to have the
Speaker 1: same the physical fidelity, it's going to tell you it's
Speaker 1: going to rain here and it's not going to rain there,
Speaker 1: or you're going to have a windstorm here, you're not
Speaker 1: going to have a windstorm there, when you're talking about
Speaker 1: a few miles apart. Only at the excess scale, we're
Speaker 1: going to be able to do that with regularity. Climate
Speaker 1: models are going to have to be at that sort
Speaker 1: of that level. AI and machine learning my help, because
Speaker 1: you know, we all have a feel for what the
Speaker 1: weather is like, right, So guess what you can train
Speaker 1: machines to sort of have a feel for what it's
Speaker 1: like as well. But you're having to stop right there
Speaker 1: because you said the machine will have a feel And
Speaker 1: this is something that I think we are trying to
Speaker 1: wrap our heads around. These are human words, they are
Speaker 1: so how do we get a feel when when when
Speaker 1: people say I have a feel for what that is,
Speaker 1: how do you get a feel? Well, it's through experience.
Speaker 1: It's through seeing the same thing over and over with
Speaker 1: slight variations and being able to predict with some amount
Speaker 1: of fidelity, what's what's going to happen again? Is it
Speaker 1: gonna happen again exactly? Like that? If if I right,
Speaker 1: this guy is gray, it might rain today exactly, or
Speaker 1: or if it's it's clear blue sky, it's not going
Speaker 1: to rain today. I have a feel for that. Even
Speaker 1: something as simple as shooting a basketball right if I
Speaker 1: sort of if I sort of cork it this way,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna miss it. If I don't, If I feel
Speaker 1: it go out of my hand the right way, it's
Speaker 1: probably going to make it. In feeling like that, that's
Speaker 1: very much the kind the thing that happens with AI
Speaker 1: and mL. You basically train mL and AI tools mL,
Speaker 1: machine learning, machine learning on lots and lots of data,
Speaker 1: so lots and lots of experiences, and then you use
Speaker 1: that to anticipate if you see a similar data set
Speaker 1: in the future, what might happen. Does Frontier understand emotion? No,
Speaker 1: Frontier does not understand emotion. It doesn't understand tone and
Speaker 1: is all it knows is sort of what it's been fed.
Speaker 1: It can fake understanding emotion. Right. So you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of the AI and mL tools feel like human right.
Speaker 1: Chat GPT is a prime example of this ring as
Speaker 1: they feel rather human, but they're not right. They're they're
Speaker 1: not formulating original fault. They're using a backlog. They're making
Speaker 1: new things, right, but out of a limited set of things.
Speaker 1: And if you steer them right, they'll just copy what
Speaker 1: they've learned before. I understand, And so does that all
Speaker 1: get stored? That memory learning gets stored, and then it
Speaker 1: can be basically resurfaced as needed, like right, and so
Speaker 1: the basically there's two sides to the artificial intelligence and
Speaker 1: machine learning coin. One is training. It turns out that
Speaker 1: machine big, huge machines like Frontier really good at training, right,
Speaker 1: because you need a lot of memory to store all
Speaker 1: those data right to be able to train an AI
Speaker 1: model on, and you need to be able to do
Speaker 1: it fast, so huge machine like Frontier is really good
Speaker 1: at that. Then you get a model, you get a
Speaker 1: reduced sort of set of things that you can use,
Speaker 1: and you want to do inferns, so you want to
Speaker 1: feed in some new inputs and get the machine learning
Speaker 1: model to tell you what the output ought to be.
Speaker 1: Those are much smaller. They typically fit like on one
Speaker 1: of those nodes you saw earlier inside the data center,
Speaker 1: fairly effectively. But the key is you probably want to
Speaker 1: use them everywhere all over the computer. You probably want
Speaker 1: to use it and lots and lots of place. This
Speaker 1: was another question for my eleven year old. How do
Speaker 1: you ask it? A question? The question is usually of
Speaker 1: the form if I do a what will happen? So
Speaker 1: like an equation almost almost, but you want to know if, basically,
Speaker 1: if I change something, what's going to happen, because that's
Speaker 1: the way I understand how something works. So, to go
Speaker 1: back to my basketball analogy, if I talk my old bow,
Speaker 1: I out or keep it in, what is I actually
Speaker 1: going to do to the fly to the ball. That's
Speaker 1: typically very much how you ask the computer a question.
Speaker 1: You do several simulations where you've tweaked one or two
Speaker 1: little things as you go along, or try to see
Speaker 1: what the answer actually is, what this big computer is
Speaker 1: actually used for. After the break, Vicky, now we know
Speaker 1: how you sit down and use this computer. So I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you one more question. Well wait, before
Speaker 1: you do, us have to say they really buried the
Speaker 1: lead on us. At the end of the tour, we
Speaker 1: stopped by an old building in an area that seemed
Speaker 1: really decrepit, and it was on the verge of demolition.
Speaker 1: Almost We walked into that building and we came to
Speaker 1: understand it was actually the site of the Manhattan Project.
Speaker 1: The reason they built this here was because in around
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight in Germany, vision was discovered, and so
Speaker 1: they convinced Albert Einstein to write a letter at President
Speaker 1: Roosevelt saying, we need a program because we don't want
Speaker 1: the Nazi ste it there before we did, and so
Speaker 1: they began a lot of work on what became known
Speaker 1: as the Manhattan Project. This part of it was to
Speaker 1: pilot the demonstration of plutonium made in a reactor. That
Speaker 1: was Bill Cabbage. He's a public information officer at oak
Speaker 1: Ridge and he was the tour guide for the Manhattan
Speaker 1: Project site. It was incredible. We had spent all day
Speaker 1: looking at what's next in the future, and all of
Speaker 1: the sudden we walked back into the past. It was
Speaker 1: filled with vintage instruments and photographs. Yeah. I really thought
Speaker 1: the wowl factor of the tour had ended when we
Speaker 1: arrived at this sort of rundown site, but I have
Speaker 1: to say it was about as cool as seeing the
Speaker 1: supercomputer up close. Why though, did they choose oak Ridge
Speaker 1: as one of the sites with the Manhattan Project. Well,
Speaker 1: we asked Bill dot and here's what he said. This
Speaker 1: area recognize it had a lot of water resources here,
Speaker 1: it was a rail hub center Knoxville was so you
Speaker 1: had electricity. He would also essentially in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: That might have been the sense back in the day,
Speaker 1: but nobody would think that this was in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere anymore. This was an incredible complex with a
Speaker 1: bunch of buildings we didn't even have a chance to
Speaker 1: go to, but we did have a chance to sit
Speaker 1: down and speak with a number of engineers and scientists
Speaker 1: who are actually using the Frontier system. One of them
Speaker 1: was Steve Hamilton. Hamilton work in the Fission Infusion Energy
Speaker 1: Sciences Directorate in a group called the High Performance Computing
Speaker 1: for Nuclear Applications, and I am the primary investigator for
Speaker 1: a project called XSMR, which is looking at solving multiphysics problems,
Speaker 1: so problems that involve multiple different domain sciences related to
Speaker 1: the modeling and simulation of nuclear reactors. And when you
Speaker 1: say reactor, are we talking a nuclear reactor, So we're
Speaker 1: talking nuclear fission reactors. So these would be designs that
Speaker 1: would be targeting production of in most cases commercial electricity production.
Speaker 1: So Steve's work on a very basic level is modeling
Speaker 1: and simulating how new designs for smaller scale nuclear reactors
Speaker 1: would function. He and his team are basically using Frontier
Speaker 1: to a stress test these by building a replica and
Speaker 1: then they test it out before trying to actually make
Speaker 1: them at scale. There's multiple reasons that we want to
Speaker 1: do these simulations. The largest factor really is cost for us.
Speaker 1: So there are some safety considerations, but in large part,
Speaker 1: if somebody proposes a reactor design, they say, I think
Speaker 1: if we had this geometry and we put this fuel
Speaker 1: and we use this coolant, I think it would be
Speaker 1: much more efficient than anything we have out there. And
Speaker 1: somebody puts this idea out there, it could take billions
Speaker 1: of dollars for them to be able to take that
Speaker 1: idea and push it forward to an actual prototype that
Speaker 1: they could demonstrate and confirm that, yes, this reactor is
Speaker 1: going to operate exactly the way that I thought it would.
Speaker 1: If we use a computer like frontier, if we build
Speaker 1: up a computational model, and we don't like to use
Speaker 1: the term too much, but one of the terms that
Speaker 1: is used a lot as digital twins. And so you're
Speaker 1: building up this digital computational representation of the system. And
Speaker 1: if you have enough confidence in your computational tools that
Speaker 1: they're accurately predicting the physics, so they're predicting what would
Speaker 1: happen inside of that reactor, then you can perform computational experiments.
Speaker 1: You don't have to have all of the physical experiments,
Speaker 1: and so you can build up confidence in these different
Speaker 1: reactor designs purely using a computer like file. So you're
Speaker 1: building a replica so that you can test it out
Speaker 1: before bringing it to scale. Essentially, what are some real
Speaker 1: life use cases like would we eventually see them powering
Speaker 1: small cities? So that is definitely in the cards. There
Speaker 1: are people who are targeting reactors. For instance, remote villages
Speaker 1: that right now are relying on diesel generators for their
Speaker 1: electricity production. If they could deploy a relatively small nuclear reactor,
Speaker 1: they could have long term stable energy production for that community,
Speaker 1: and it would ultimately be at a substantially lower cost
Speaker 1: thanesel generator would cost to operate over long periods of time.
Speaker 1: But there even within the smaller reactors doesn't necessarily imply
Speaker 1: that it's these niche markets. So the small modulear reactors
Speaker 1: can also be deployed for large scale electricity production. We
Speaker 1: also spoke with Dan Jacobson. He's a chief scientist for
Speaker 1: something called Computational systems Biology, So I'm a computational systems biologist.
Speaker 1: We're trying to utilize data from all of those different
Speaker 1: types of molecules together with environmental information and then using
Speaker 1: whole ensembles of algorithms on the exoscale computing systems here
Speaker 1: to solve what are really complex problems. This stuff was
Speaker 1: pretty mind blowing. Dan talked to us about a bunch
Speaker 1: of ways he's been using exoscale computing to layer information
Speaker 1: to tackle issues like climate health or future pandemics. But
Speaker 1: there's one thing he's using Frontier for that we did
Speaker 1: not expect. One of the big concerns in the US population,
Speaker 1: even perhaps more so in the veterans population is suicide,
Speaker 1: suicide ideations, suicide attempts, and one of the initial questions
Speaker 1: in that is are there genetic architectures that predispose people
Speaker 1: to suicide attempts. We have this wonderful collaboration between the
Speaker 1: Veterans Administration and the DUE where actually all the electronic
Speaker 1: health records for the entire VIE systems. We have a
Speaker 1: copy of herod O creation gets updated nightly, and we
Speaker 1: have genotype information now for over eight hundred thousand patients
Speaker 1: and the goal is they get that to two million.
Speaker 1: This is out of the MVP million Veterans program from
Speaker 1: the VA, and this is a tremendous resource for human
Speaker 1: systems biology and human health trying to understand again the
Speaker 1: mechanisms of disease, both at the clinical level as well
Speaker 1: as at the molecular level. Having this larger population that
Speaker 1: we have genomics information and clinical information for allows us
Speaker 1: to start to tackle those sorts of questions, questions about
Speaker 1: data and privacy with all of these frontier projects kept
Speaker 1: coming up throughout our visit, so we wanted to know
Speaker 1: how are they protecting privacy of these veterans health records.
Speaker 1: The VA data sits here a very secure enclave. It's
Speaker 1: a PHI certified enclave, and they are very strict access controls.
Speaker 1: Everybody goes through lots of training to be able to
Speaker 1: use this data. But the data that we see is anonymized.
Speaker 1: We don't see names or addresses. That's all been scrubbed
Speaker 1: by the time we see it. And so we're interested
Speaker 1: in understanding the clinical variables, and we're looking at thousands
Speaker 1: or millions of them, so we're never going to drill
Speaker 1: down to an individual patient. Genomic tracking is already pretty impressive,
Speaker 1: but Dan explained that it's just the tip of the
Speaker 1: iceberg in understanding and treating disease. We're doing a lot
Speaker 1: of this in addiction work. We study a lot of
Speaker 1: neuropsychological conditions, cardiovascular disease, cancer, infectious diseases, and we're actually
Speaker 1: scaling up to do this on about two thousand to
Speaker 1: three thousand human diseases, so we'll have this complete network
Speaker 1: model of the interconnections between human disease and mechanistic understanding
Speaker 1: and how you have a lot of comorbidities people with
Speaker 1: multiple diseases that tend to co occur. This will help
Speaker 1: us understand why why are these things tied together. Another
Speaker 1: area he and his team built was a climate model
Speaker 1: of basically the entire planet. We've taken about the past
Speaker 1: sixty years of climate information for every point of land
Speaker 1: on the planet around the world, and we built vectors tensors,
Speaker 1: strings of numbers representing all the different components in the
Speaker 1: environment at every position. Well, those vectors, now we can
Speaker 1: use the Comet codebase we develop on Summit and Frontier
Speaker 1: to compare all of those vectors to each other. So
Speaker 1: we're trying to say what are the similar environments of
Speaker 1: all the possible environments on Earth. So now we have
Speaker 1: a really fascinating color representation and this is the highest
Speaker 1: resolution climate type map ever done in human history. It
Speaker 1: looks really cool, but the truly amazing thing was learning
Speaker 1: what you can actually do with this model. We can
Speaker 1: zoom into different areas of interest in this case for pandemics,
Speaker 1: things like Eastern Australia, Indonesia, Bangladesh from Central Africa, all
Speaker 1: hot spots for different types of viruses that we know
Speaker 1: are being affected by climate change, and this is allowing
Speaker 1: us to shine the flashlight where do we need to
Speaker 1: be concerned. Where's the biggest relativistic climate change affecting bat
Speaker 1: populations and viruses and their food sources. Where do we
Speaker 1: need to be focusing. So to pull this off, we
Speaker 1: did nine point three extra flop calculation. That's the fastest
Speaker 1: calculation done in human history. Overall, it was one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty eight zeta ops, so that's ten to the
Speaker 1: twenty three zeros mathematical operations that had to be calculated
Speaker 1: to pull this off. It's one of the largest calculations
Speaker 1: done and about ten to the seventeenth network edges calculated.
Speaker 1: This one of the largest networks ever created. Again, how
Speaker 1: we're using these sorts of exoscale resources to tackle problems
Speaker 1: we simply couldn't do before. So at this point we're
Speaker 1: really starting to get a sense of how much is
Speaker 1: possible when you have computing power with like eighteen zeros
Speaker 1: after it per second. But I think for us both
Speaker 1: this next example was absolutely the most fascinating is something
Speaker 1: called zoonosis, and it made us really glad we were
Speaker 1: there with some really large brains that are working on
Speaker 1: these problems. A lot of our focus now is on
Speaker 1: trying to understand zonosis. How pathogens, viruses and other microbes
Speaker 1: often sit nascent in animal reservoirs. When those viruses get
Speaker 1: into other species that are not ready for them, like us,
Speaker 1: that leads to disease, and COVID nineteen is one example
Speaker 1: of that. But the rules of zonosis, how and why
Speaker 1: this happens and what's driving it are actually fairly poorly understood.
Speaker 1: And then he hit us with flying foxes. So the
Speaker 1: system are studying are in flying foxes. So these are
Speaker 1: these giant bats that have like a six foot wingspan.
Speaker 1: They traditionally live in roosts of two hundred thousand bats
Speaker 1: in the jungle. They carry these viruses called hendra and hinipoviruses,
Speaker 1: which in the Australian system, if they get into horses
Speaker 1: they kill about seventy percent of the horses. When they
Speaker 1: get from horses into people, it's also a seventy percent
Speaker 1: mortality rate. So, I mean, COVID nineteen has been horrific,
Speaker 1: but it's a sub one percent mortality rate. Seventy percent
Speaker 1: mortality rate is game over right, So we want to
Speaker 1: really understand these systems and learn how to prevent that
Speaker 1: sort of spread before they become efficient at human to
Speaker 1: human spread. All right, Wess, let's take a moment here
Speaker 1: for you to digest this. It took us a minute
Speaker 1: the idea that this virus could go from flying foxes
Speaker 1: to horses and then horses to humans. I mean, this
Speaker 1: could potentially wipe out populations. So we're actually looking at
Speaker 1: We know that when there are food shortages, that puts
Speaker 1: the bats under stress, messing with their ecosystem. So we
Speaker 1: want to understand what causes these food shortages. So we
Speaker 1: took all these environmental variables and we threw them into
Speaker 1: one of our explainable AI approaches over time and space,
Speaker 1: and we're actually we thought this was a ten year
Speaker 1: goal that we could someday learn some of these rules
Speaker 1: about an environment and Baigali, we're about to submit the
Speaker 1: paper showing this predictive model that is very good at
Speaker 1: picking up these little black dots at the top are
Speaker 1: when food shortages are occurring, so we can start to
Speaker 1: get up to a year warning when one of these
Speaker 1: pandemic breakoats could be occurring that we need to start
Speaker 1: watching for and then zooming on where and when to look.
Speaker 1: So you saw all of that in just one day,
Speaker 1: Ed oak Ridge, Yeah, we did. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: crazy because these are just some of the first projects
Speaker 1: getting started because it just got built and it's got,
Speaker 1: as we heard, five to seven years of lifespan left,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of room to grow, and they're
Speaker 1: just getting started, and as we also learned, they're already
Speaker 1: building the next one. So I mean, for us, one
Speaker 1: of the big challenges of on a machine like Frontier,
Speaker 1: which has also been one of the fun aspects of it.
Speaker 1: So it's all a big challenge, but it's just the
Speaker 1: sheer number of people that you have to bring together
Speaker 1: to be able to run one of these simulations, the
Speaker 1: number of interactions and managing that as you're working all
Speaker 1: working towards getting to this final capability that you have
Speaker 1: to be able to use a machine like Frontier. It's
Speaker 1: been very, very rewarding. Vic Katherine, next time you're go
Speaker 1: on a field trip, I'm going with you. We'd love
Speaker 1: to have you us. You got it. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily
Speaker 1: podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email
Speaker 1: us questions our comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina.
Speaker 1: Our senior producer is Katherine Fink, and they both produced
Speaker 1: this episode. Raphael M Seely is our engineer. Our original
Speaker 1: music is composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Casova. Will
Speaker 1: be back on Monday with another Big Take. Have a
Speaker 1: great weekend. My kids are at an age where we've
Speaker 1: been watching The Terminator. Terminator to cyberdine, will it become
Speaker 1: self aware? Do you do you believe that it has
Speaker 1: a capability to become self aware? I don't. I will
Speaker 1: say that colleagues of mine who are interested in this
Speaker 1: question and I talked about it that I just talked
Speaker 1: about about where do the heavy elements come from? Um.
Speaker 1: They built a code module to sort of do that,
Speaker 1: to sort of trace the transmutation of elements as they
Speaker 1: get heavier and heavier. They called it Skynet, which I
Speaker 1: thought was like dangerously arrogant of their part. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: thought I thought, really, you're going to tempt fail. It's
Speaker 1: a little too it's a little too real. We're getting
Speaker 1: a little late in the game, if you will, to
Speaker 1: call something that. But yeah, they just plowed ahead. And
Speaker 1: the in fact, they even use and you know on
Speaker 1: their website, Yeah they use the symbol from the movie. Yeah,