Interview: AMD’s John Gustafson on the Challenges of Exascale

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Over at The Exascale Report, Mike Bernhardt has posted an interesting interview with John Gustafson, newly appointed Senior Fellow and Chief Product Architect for AMD’s Graphics Business Unit.

If you can solve the performance-per-watt problem, then the next challenges are building a good software model, followed by resilience and reliability, all areas where AMD will undoubtedly make key contributions. I’m questioning that we should just be pumping out ten to the eighteenth double precision operations all the time as our goal, because in most areas of computing, there is a way to improve the quality of the computation and the validity of the results, and we need to be taking a much harder look at ‘what the heck are we computing anyway?’ and not just blindly apply finer meshes and more time steps. It’s time to think about the physics really hard and ask what is the problem we are trying to solve.”

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