100 Million-Core Supercomputers Coming By 2018

CWmike writes "As amazing as today's supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive and current designs soak up too much power, space and money. And as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough — a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system. Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The US Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful — an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The latter project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the US is co-developing. They're expected to arrive in 2018 — in line with Moore's Law — which helps to explain the roughly 10-year development period. But the problems involved in reaching exaflop scale go well beyond Moore's Law."

Comments

Limits on simulation.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The programming techniques and mathematical formulations needed to take advantage of such very large number of processors continue to be the main stumbling blocks. Some kind of simulations parallelize naturally. Time accurate fulid flow simulation for example is very easy to parallelize and technically you can devote a processor for each element and do time marching nicely. But not all physics problems are amenable to parallelization. Further even in the nice cases like fluid flow, if one tries to do solution adaptive meshing, no uniform grids etc, the time step slows down so much the simulation takes too long even on a 100 million processor machine.

The CFL condition that limits the maximum time step one can take shows no sign of relenting. Score has been Courant (the C in CFL) 1, Moore 0 for the last three decades.

human brain

[simoncpu was here]

How many cores do we need to simulate a human brain?

Re:Who's President, Future-boy?

[mcgrew]

My cell phone is a supercomputer. At least, it would have been if I'd had it in 1972. Rather then being from the future, he, like me, is from the past and living in this science fiction future when all that fantasy stuff like doors that open by themselves, rockets to space, phones that need no wires and fit in your pocket, computers on your desk, ovens that bake a potato in three minutes without the oven getting hot, flat screen TVs that aren't round at the corners, eye implants that cure nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism and cataracts all at once, etc.

Back when I was young it didn't seem primitive at all. Looking back, GEES. When you went to the hospital they knocked you out with automotive starting fluid and left scars eight inches wide. These days they say "you're going to sleep now" and you blink and find yourself in the recovery room, feeling no pain or nausea with a tiny scar.

We are indeed living in primitive times. Back in the 1870s a man quit the Patent office on the grounds that everything useful had already been invented. If you're young enough you're going to see things that you couldn't imagine, or at least couldn't believe possible.

Sickness, pain, and death. And Star Trek.