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."

Comments

Has this been turned into another pissing contest?

[Taco Cowboy]

All the talk about who has the fastest / most awesome computer in the world used to make sense --- there were a lot of problems which need huge computational power to help solve

They went from mere gigaflop to petaflop and now they are aiming all the way to break the exaflop barrier

Now, let me ask this --- is there really a case which justifice all the juice ?

From giga to peta, it's already a difference of 1,000 times

From peta to exa, another 1,000

Which means, when they finally break the exa-barrier, they already attain 1,000,000 (one million times) the crunching power of what they used to get, in the giga era

Do they really need the 1,000,000 fold of crunch to solve their problem, or has this been turning into another "pene" contest ?