Has Supercomputing Hit a Brick Wall?

anzha writes "Horst Simon, Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has stood up at conferences of late and said the unthinkable: supercomputing is hitting a wall and will not build an exaFLOPS HPC system by 2020. This is defined as one that passes linpack with a performance of one exaFLOPS sustained or better. He's even placed money on it. You can read the original presentation here."

Re:Clarke's Three Laws

[Anonymous Coward]

he should stick to building vacuum cleaners.

I just woke up...

[Kaenneth]

And still a little fuzzy headed, but the first thing I though of was arranging the racks for shortest maximim path, instead of one big football field sized room, stacking the datacenter into a cube shape... Then I thoght, "That's probably why Borg ships are Cubes."

Re:Clarke's Three Laws

[tgd]

You don't seem to understand the "concept" behind "warp."

You are not exceeding the speed of light, you are just not traveling the linear distance between the two points.

That's like saying that he doesn't understand the concept behind a Stargate. Made up is made up is made up.

You can't have an honest discourse on the speed if light when you're trying to involve fiction. You might as well go full star trek and say that thetalon radiation transmorphs subspace and changes the value of C, but only in the presence of an extradimensional rift, and if-and-only-if you have a humpback whale.

Re:It is tough

[fisted]

> Just the yesterday there was another thread where someone was trying to suggest [...] instead of realizing [...].

What?! Someone was wrong on the Internet?