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64 exaflop limit to current computing paradigm
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HPCWire – Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics & Computing at Indiana University, takes us through some of the most critical developments in high performance computing, explaining why the transition to exascale is going to be very different than the ones in the past and how the United States is losing its leadership in HPC innovation.
Exascale is also different because unlike previous milestones, it is unlikely that we will face yet another one in the future. These words may be thrown back in my face, but I think we will never reach zettaflops, at least not by doing discrete floating point operations. We are reaching the anvil of the technology S-curve and will be approaching an asymptote of single program performance due to a combination of factors including atomic granularity at nanoscale.
A new execution model as an embodiment of a paradigm shift will drive this transition from old systems to new. We have done this before in the case of scalar to vector and SIMD, and again from these to message passing, MPPs, and clusters. We are now simply — or not so simply — facing another phase shift in HPC system programming, structure, and operation.
Of course I anticipate something else will be devised that is beyond my imagination, perhaps something akin to quantum computing, metaphoric computing, or biological computing. But whatever it is, it won’t be what we’ve been doing for the last seven decades. That is another unique aspect of the exascale milestone and activity. For a number, I’m guessing about 64 exaflops to be the limit, depending on the amount of pain we are prepared to tolerate.
Thomas Sterling will be delivering the Wednesday keynote at this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'12), which will take place in Hamburg, Germany from June 17-21. His presentation will examine the achievements over the past 12 months in high performance computing.
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