Co-design for Exascale: False Hopes?

Andrew Jones has a new post on the ISC Blog about how the mantra of co-design may in fact be distracting us from some of pressing challenges on the road to Exascale.

Users of HPC along with HPC professionals and advocates have assembled a plethora of cases where Exascale systems will be beneficial or even required to achieve the science or business goals. A broad set of R&D into exascale technologies is underway by vendors, academic researchers & government. But, in my view, the Exascale conversation is still too focused on FLOPS, and indeed on hardware in general rather than full ecosystem of hardware, software, applications, people, …