Israel lags behind Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China and Mexico in the field of supercomputing. Less than a decade ago it was among the most advanced countries in the world
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Israel is deleted from the list of countries that operate supercomputers. The Council for Higher Education announced Monday evening that it is closing the National Supercomputer Unit due to the lack of a $XNUMX million budget.
In the past, the council received a budget of two million dollars from the Ministry of Science, while now the funding of the unit falls on its meager budget because most of the demand for the services of Baal comes from academic institutions to carry out scientific research work.
12 years ago, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appealed to then American President Bill Clinton with a request that he cancel the American ban on the import of supercomputers to Israel.
Professor Pinchas Bar Yosef, chairman of the steering committee of the supercomputer department at the Interuniversity Computing Center, says that this will harm academic research because since the computer was put into operation 12 years ago, nearly 300 scientific studies have been carried out with its help. Closing the unit will harm scientific research, but it will also harm Israel's scientific standing in the world. The closing of the supercomputer unit sends a negative message to the scientific world that sees Israel as an important and leading scientific center.
With the announcement of the Council for Higher Education, a 12-year chapter in scientific research in Israel is closed. There are 500 civil supercomputers operating in the world and we will be one of the few western countries that do not operate such a computer. And not only Western countries, since in this field we are lagging behind Korea, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the latter operating nine such computers, while we operated two.
Israel is one of the few Western countries that does not have a supercomputer in the list of the 500 fastest civilian supercomputers in the world.
The definition of a supercomputer is simple - the fastest and most advanced computer at any given moment. Today, a computer capable of performing more than a trillion calculation operations per second is defined as such. Using the supercomputers, simulations are made for material compounds and in the fields of chemistry, physics, nanotechnology and biotechnology. According to Prof. Pinchas Bar Yosef, chairman of the steering committee of the supercomputer department at the Interuniversity Computing Center, the Ministry of Defense expressed opposition to the closing of the center out of fear that the training of experts in the field would cease, even though it is not among the civilian supercomputer center's clients.
According to Bar Yosef, "To date, 280 advanced academic studies have been conducted using supercomputers. The researchers' alternative is to use the supercomputers of colleagues from abroad, provided that the knowledge gained as a result of using the computers also remains abroad and is associated with the host computing body. In all these countries it is supercomputers that are defined as a national resource. These computers are managed and budgeted that way and not by private parties."
Bar Yosef says that it was only when it was forbidden to import supercomputers to Israel that it interested the treasury, the academy and the government. According to him, "as soon as this was allowed, they became less interesting, even if not less important." Bilad says that a development budget of 2 million dollars per year is needed to preserve Israel's position in the field.
In 96 - after the universities' supercomputer unit (ILAD) received a budget of 2 million dollars per year from the Ministry of Science and a procurement budget - two first IBM and Cray supercomputers with 64 parallel processors were purchased, placing Israel in 174th place among The countries have fast supercomputers. In 2002, the last supercomputer in the unit (Carmel) was upgraded to 128 parallel processors and since then no upgrades have been made to the system.
Since 2000 - when the computing system of the "Smurf" processor clusters was installed - Israel has not been placed in the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. This list is also an indication of the country's computing power and its technological and scientific ability.
The irony of fate is that one of the prominent players in the field of supercomputers is the Israeli company Voltir, which develops communication chips of the Infiniwood type to link the fast processors. The company's products are installed on the second fastest supercomputer in the world, NASA's.
Despite the expected closure of the supercomputer unit, the academy is not really excited either. Researchers say that in recent years the supercomputer has become irrelevant. The reason, according to them, is outdated computing and the regulations of the Higher Education Council (the Committee for Planning and Budgeting in the Higher Education Council) that rolled the budget for the use of these computers onto their research budgets.
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