Slashdot Mirror
Breaking Supercomputers' Exaflops Barrier
Nerval's Lobster writes "Breaking the exaflops barrier remains a development goal for many who research high-performance computing. Some developers predicted that China's new Tianhe-2 supercomputer would be the first to break through. Indeed, Tianhe-2 did pretty well when it was finally revealed — knocking the U.S.-based Titan off the top of the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. Yet despite sustained performance of 33 petaflops to 35 petaflops and peaks ranging as high as 55 petaflops, even the world's fastest supercomputer couldn't make it past (or even close to) the big barrier. Now, the HPC market is back to chattering over who'll first build an exascale computer, and how long it might take to bring such a platform online. Bottom line: It will take a really long time, combined with major breakthroughs in chip design, power utilization and programming, according to Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally, who gave the keynote speech at the 2013 International Supercomputing Conference last week in Leipzig, Germany. In a speech he called 'Future Challenges of Large-scale Computing' (and in a blog post covering similar ground), Dally described some of the incredible performance hurdles that need to be overcome in pursuit of the exaflops barrier."
I'm pretty sure the parent is questioning why the word "barrier" is used instead of something like "milestone", which I would have chosen. A barrier implies there is something special stopping you there that you need to work around or resolve, but milestone is just a convenient number to stop at, as in this case. I see no difference between passing exaflop and say 0.9 exaflop, since both require "a really long time, combined with major breakthroughs in chip design, power utilization and programming", so it isn't a barrier, just a convenient number.
Should have used "tera" in place for "giga"
I'm getting tired of all the prefixes, couldn't we just use scientific notation? 1e18 flops means a lot more to me than exaflop.
Well I don't know anything at all about nuclear simulations and fluid dynamics modeling...
But for pure benefit to mankind I'd say folding@home is a pretty worthy project. It's been running for years and has helped make actual discoveries and raised understanding of protein folding's effects.
According to Wikipedia it was running at 14 Petaflops when last updated. Would taking that up to an exaflop be a huge benefit? You bet!
How about being able to simulate an entire life cycle of a human body at atomic scale? That would gain us tremendous understanding of well... EVERYTHING.
Most definitely there are worthy projects that have a real need for exaflop computing and it's not a waste of time.
You remind me of my friend who years ago said that his 802.11b wireless network was as fast as he'd ever need. Guess he didn't plan on people watching multiple HDTV streams throughout the house.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz