Entries filed under “Exascale”

Over at The Exascale Report, Mike Bernhardt has posted an interesting interview with Intel’s Raj Hazra, Vice-President Intel Architecture Group & GM Technical Computing. When asked why we should build an Exaflop machine, Hazra contends that we should focus on the economic benefits.

So the exciting part of exaFLOPS is that while it allows you to build those great big machines, it also lets you democratize HPC by essentially building half a petaflops, which today would be in the top 100 supercomputers, under everybody’s desk. And it would be done at both a capital and a TCO cost that changes the game. The economic discussion is fundamental. That’s 300,000 potential users just in manufacturing in the U.S. that we’ve looked at. If they were to use any level of HPC or extreme scale computing, how much value would they generate and what would it do to the HPC market?

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In related news, be sure to check out Hazra’s ISC’13 keynote on June 17:

Session Title: Driving Industrial Innovation on the Road to Exascale
Date: June 17
Time: 6:15 – 6:45 pm CET
Place: Hall 2, Congress Center Leipzig

In the past years one could observe a significant consolidation of non-system vendors providing interconnect technologies and associated topological options. Only a few providers with proprietary interconnects are still around. The two talks in the session will provide a deeper insight into future interconnect standards and topologies and will also address the migration from electrical to optical interconnects at system level.

Over at The Exascale Report, Mike Bernhardt has posted an in-depth with Intel’s Diane Bryant, Senior Vice President and General Manger, Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. Bryant gives her perspective on high performance computing, U.S. competitiveness, and the goal of reaching Exascale computing performance by 2020.

The U.S. government’s investment in the move to Exascale is very important. The U.S. government has been a driving force year after year after year in advancing the state of computing. That’s important for the industry. It’s important for the United States, for public interest, and for economic development. And, at large, we will collectively, holistically continue the move to exascale. Government can’t do this without industry, and industry can’t do this without the support of the government. Intel invested $10 billion in R&D last year, and we continue to make a significant investments year over year in R&D. We take the High Performance Computing and the supercomputing space extremely seriously. If for no other reason, technology starts at the top and like water, falls down. Everyone benefits from that trickle down – from the highest supercomputing investment down to commercial HPC down to the desktop. So we will continue to invest. From an international perspective, you certainly do see other governments – other geographies – recognizing the criticality of an investment by the government in supercomputing. It’s actually very encouraging. It reinforces what the U.S. government has been doing year after year, decade after decade.

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Over at ExtremeTech, Joel Hruska writes that the daunting challenges of achieving exascale compute levels by the end of the decade were brought home recently in a presentation by Horst Simon, the Deputy Director at NERSC. In fact, Simon has wagered $2000 of his own money that we wont get there by 2020.

But here’s the thing: What if the focus on “exascale” is actually the wrong way to look at the problem?

FLOPS has persisted as a metric in supercomputing even as core counts and system density has risen, but the peak performance of a supercomputer may be a poor measure of its usefulness. The ability to efficiently utilize a subset of the system’s total performance capability is extremely important. In the long term, FLOPS are easier than moving data across nodes. Taking advantage of parallelism becomes even more important. Keeping data local is a better way to save power than spreading the workload across nodes, because as node counts rise, concurrency consumes an increasing percentage of total system power.

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