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Intel Aims For Exaflops Supercomputer By 2018
siliconbits writes "Intel has laid down its roadmap in terms of computing performance for the next seven years in a press release; in addition, it revealed its expectations until 2027 in one deck of slides shown last week. The semiconductor chip maker wants a supercomputer capable of reaching 1000 petaflops (or one exaflops) to be unveiled by the end of 2018 (just in time for the company's 50th anniversary) with four exaflops being the upper end target by the end of the decade. The slide that was shared also shows that Intel wants to smash the zettaflops barrier — that's one million petaflops — sometime before 2030. This, Intel expects, will allow for significant strides in the field of genomics research, as well as much more accurate weather prediction (assuming Skynet or the Matrix hasn't taken over the world)."
Exaflop computing is a requirement for the Square Kilometre Array. There is still a long way to go until there might be an upper limit, especially in Radio Astronomy.
http://www.skatelescope.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array
http://www.ska.gov.au/
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
...make accurate weather prediction any less necessary?
Power supply can get be an issue. You can read about the NSA and the size and new power supply needs as it expands at Fort Meade: :)
http://publicintelligence.net/nsa-site-m-cybercom/
No upper limits, just more land, power, cooling and smart people to keep the funding flowing.
What each chip can do is limited, but you just keep buying more
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If my calculations are correct, 1 exaflop with today's best hardware translates to roughly 2000 m^2 worth of CPU area. Reportedly a little less than half an American football field.
Still I'm not sure if it's enough for what I want, namely to create new lifeforms, artificially evolved to say live on a partially terraformed Mars. - That or give teens genetic upgrades for irises which change colour with their mood. The latter of these seems more likely to be met with commercial success.
All rites reversed 2010
For video manipulation, it can still take a unpleasantly long time.
Basically a computer needs to be able to do anything a human can ask of it. Well we can ask an awful lot. I want a computer that can understand natural language and respond in kind. I want a computer that can render 3D graphics that look perfectly real. I want a computer that can accurately model the weather system of the entire planet, and so on.
We are still a long, LONG way from computing power not mattering anymore. Particularly at the high end where this is targeted. While the weather system modeling might be silly for a home user to say, it is something that we'd very much like a computer to do. However right now all the systems are crude models, very much is simplified because there just isn't the power to truly model everything down to, say, the molecular level.
However with enough power, such a thing could be done. How much I don't know, way more than we've got now, but it is perfectly possible.
So we really don't yet know what the upper bounds on what we might want in terms of processing power is. We won't really know until we start reaching it. We'll start having systems and any time we think up something new for them to do, they'll be able to do it with power to spare. Then we'll know "This is it, there really isn't a need for more processing power."
We may well hit physical limits before that though.
It is "one exaflop" and "1000 petaflops". FLOPS still meanst FLoating point Operation(s) Per Second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
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