In news that’s sure to make your fancy new quad-core rig seem pathetic in comparison, Computerworld claims that in fewer than ten years, supercomputers will boast a whopping 100 million cores as they break the exaflop barrier. To reach this milestone, however, engineers will face a few challenges, in addition to cramming 100 million cores into a computer, such as power consumption and core composition:
“We think exascale is a 100 million-core kind of enterprise, and there doesn’t seem any real pathway around it, said Turek. “Where the players in pursuit of exascale are today is [at] a state of investigation to see what the right model is. So if hybridization is the key, then what is the ratio of special-purpose cores to conventional cores?” he said.
These future systems will have to use less memory per core and will need more memory bandwidth. Systems running 100 million cores will continually see core failures and the tools for dealing with them will have to be rethought “in a dramatic kind of way,” said Turek.
IBM’s design goal for an exascale system is to limit it to 20 megawatts of power and keep it at a size of between 70 and 80 racks. Jaguar is entirely built of CPUs, but Bland also sees future systems as hybrids, and points to chip development by both Intel and AMD that combine CPUs and co-processors.
“We believe that using accelerators is going to be absolutely critical to any strategy to getting to exaflop computers,” he said.
Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect Research, an HPC research firm in Sunnyvale, Calif., said accelerators are capable of providing vast computational capability for specific applications, and the applications that can take advantage of them can move toward exascale first.” Eventually, a general-purpose exascale system will arrive, “but special-purpose will probably come first.”
This estimate comes hot on the heels of news that Jaguar, the supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has claimed the title of “world’s most powerful supercomputer” with a theoretical top speed of 2.3 petaflops and consisting of 250,000 cores.