Andrew Jones on Four Recurring HPC Themes in 2012

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Andrew Jones from NAG in the U.K. is back with his review of the year 2012 in HPC. He picked up on four recurring themes, and not all of them are good.

  • The exascale race stalls
  • Petaflops become “ordinary”
  • HPC seeks to engage a broader user community
  • Assault on the Top500

It’s very likely that Jones attends even more HPC events than I do, so he definitely has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on out there in the community. I think his take on that last point is especially worth noting, though I’m not sure I agree:

In my view, the Top500 is NOT broken – it is the use to which the Top500 data is put that is broken. The Top500 is useful because it is a set of 500 data points collected twice a year in a consistent manner for 20 years. It’s value is as a data set – either of 500 points at any one collection, or as trends over time of subsets, etc.

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