Entries filed under “Exascale”

Over at The Exascale Report, Bill Gropp from NCSA writes that to make Exascale a reality, we need to stop talking just about Exascale.

We can start by moving away from a focus on FLOPS (especially as measured by benchmarks that we know are misleading but that the greater computer science community thinks we still take seriously) and focus on solving the hardest, toughest, most challenging computational problems. This also provides the best guidance and rationale for the development of the new technologies needed to realize the much faster machines we all believe are essential. Yes, not having such a simple metric as ExaFLOPS makes it harder to quantify the goals, but we all know that an effective HPC system can’t be described by a single number.

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Over at Datacenter Knowledge, Intel’s Winston Saunders looks at how the most recent Top500 and Green500 machines stack up in terms of Exascalar, the “logarithmic distance” to 10¹⁸ flops in a 20 MegaWatt power envelope.

The November 2012 Exascalar (Performance-Efficiency Scalar) Top 10 list is shown below. The biggest change is at the top of the list, the new DPE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory system with a best-ever Exascalar of 2.22. Since Exascalar is logarithmic, this equates to about a factor of 166 from the Exascalar goals in efficiency and performance. In June 2012, the peak Exascalar was 2.26, about a 10 percent improvement from the June 2012 list.

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Dan Reed from the University of Iowa writes that the design of an Exascale systems needs to take into account Little’s Law, a simple, yet subtle forumula that that relates performance (throughput), delay (response time) and number of interacting units (customers).

Little’s Law also says there is no free lunch. Optimizing for high system utilization leads to large wait times for customers, as anyone who has waited on a busy telephone reservation line knows all too well. Conversely, ensuring short waiting lines requires system utilization to be low. Simply put, one must choose between high system efficiency and short customer wait times. One cannot (in general) have both.

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Over at The Exascale Report, John Barr writes that the European Commission has been funding research activities that expand the use of Petascale facilities by researchers across Europe and lay some of the groundwork for the move towards Exascale. However, the European Exascale strategy is evolving, with a much stronger focus on support for industry – both ISVs and the European HPC supply side industry – appearing in recent initiatives.

The Communication proposed that a world class HPC infrastructure should be provided for European academic and industrial users (with a focus on support for SMEs), and that Europe’s position as a supplier of HPC technologies should be strengthened. The governance for this activity should cover both industry (through an industry led technology platform) and science (through PRACE). It is proposed that the annual funding for European HPC R&D be increased from €630 million in 2009 to €1.2 billion to make this activity competitive at a global level. The additional €600 million would come from national budgets, the Commission and industrial users. Half of the new funding would be to fund the procurement of HPC systems and testbeds, with the remainder split evenly between training and software.

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Over at International Science Grid this Week, Amber Harmon discusses Exascale with William Harrod, division director for the US Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

The DOE has yet to design or develop actual exascale systems, but Herrod remains confident that future investments could make them a reality. He is less sure of the systems’ importance to Congress, as lawmakers have yet to decide on funding. That said, extreme science is not waiting. Scientists and researchers have, in some cases, reached the limits of what petascale can provide and stand at a crossroads waiting for exascale and funding to come together. As Thomas Sterling, associate director of the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) at Indiana University asked at the end of 2011, “Can the US influence exascale direction and maintain a strategic lead in its deployment?” We have arrived at the end of 2012, and the answer remains to be seen.

It’s a good read. And while future U.S. policy and science budgets are up in the air these days, the resolve to reach this next leap in computation certainly remains strong as ever. Read the Full Story.