SCIENCE

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Richard Murphy has been identified as a “person to watch,” not by the CIA but by the respected online computing magazine HPCwire. The magazine each year names a handful of researchers whom its editors believe to be doing the world’s most interesting work in supercomputing.

Murphy is principal investigator for Sandia’s X-caliber project, an effort to radically lower the power usage of computer systems at all scales by 2018, when the next generation of supercomputers is predicted to come into use.

“If we don’t solve the power problem,” Murphy said, “we’ll have to stop building bigger, faster supercomputers, or they’ll become resources that cost as much to use as superconducting supercolliders, which will really limit their impact.”

The work is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ).

Murphy also led the launch this year of the newly created Graph500 test, an internationally used benchmark that offers an alternative to the Linpack500, which for years has been the standard measure of the ability of computers to manipulate large data sets.

“In the past, we designed supercomputers to do physics. That’s why rapid FLOPS [floating-decimal-point operations-per-second] are so important, because there’s a lot of math to do.  But this new kind of test measures memory access and the ability to marshal huge data sets efficiently,” he said. “Graph500 is a test for a totally new area.”

Applications include following the huge number of barrels of oil in transit around the world in ships, or keeping track of the medical records of every patient in the U.S.

In fact, he said, the goal is a transformation of the field, from using supercomputers to simulate a hypothesis to building supercomputers capable of generating a hypothesis.

“These techniques could be used to figure out how to personalize courses of treatment based on genetic or environmental factors,” Murphy said. “We could figure out, in very specific populations, how effective a new medicine is, and actually recommend courses of action.”

The transition to exascale computing, or one million trillion operations per second, will be challenging, Murphy said. “Unlike the tera-to-petascale transition, we know we can’t just scale commodity architectures: the barriers have to do with fundamental physics. Perhaps even more significantly, the tasks we want the computer to achieve are changing: it’s not just 3-D physics anymore. This changes the computer’s architectural requirements and how we design the system.

“But I think we have to have this capability to maintain our national competitiveness,” he said.

Murphy’s nerdish fascination with computing started early. He built his first network protocol and programming language in high school, and had the idea of building a three-dimensional online world with the goal of selling stuff on it — “think Second Life crossed with Amazon before Second Life existed”— but that bubble burst before he could implement it, he said.

He’s one of the few people in the 168-year history of the University of Notre Dame to hold four degrees from that institution — a Bachelor of Science in computer science, a Bachelor of Arts in government,  and a master’s and a doctorate, both in computer science and engineering.