Monday August 27, 2007 HPC Wire's mysterious High-end Crusader writes on the Petaflop future of HPC and the failure of traditional architectures to get us there:
"This sweet spot is constantly evolving; it might be anywhere from a few tens to a few hundreds of sustained TFs/s in 2011. Pseudo-commercial super clusters are red herrings that obscure this clear picture. Be this as it may, only a handful of systems are scaling ambitiously. The reference machine is, of course, Japan's Keisoku Keisanki, which is running in the Riken lab today at 2 PFs/s. This is a machine whose heroic _useful_ scalability is due to brilliantly engineered integration of heterogeneous processors. Here is the break down of its 10 PFs/s. First, 1.5 PFs/s comes from (presumably out-of-order) scalar processors. Then, there is another 0.5 PFs/s coming from vector processors. Finally, the heavy lifting is done by "Grape-7", which is an array of identical special-purpose devices (SPD) specially optimized for finite-element analysis. This SPD array makes up the remaining 8 PFs/s." Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 27, 2007 05:00 AM ) PermalinkComments are closed for this entry.
