Has Supercomputing Hit a Brick Wall? 185
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."
No? (Score:5, Informative)
"Japan to develop new exaflop computer by 2020" [japandailypress.com] ... why not? And if it's even a few microseconds into 2021 I suppose that supercomputing has failed, will pack up, and go home.
Re:No? (Score:5, Informative)
Power consumption and MTBF: power consumption (high operating costs) be solved perhaps be solved by a larger budget, but the mean time between failures (MTBF) means, that the machine will fail before it can compute anything meaningful. Right know the machines we build, and even more importantly, the software we build rely on all parts of the machine to function. If even a single node fails, then the data it holds becomes inaccessible and the rest of the compute job crashes like a house of cards.
This can be remedied by taking frequent snapshots and then restarting from the last snapshot, but the time for checkpoint/restart has been continuously growing for the last systems. No one really expects exascale systems to do full system checkpoint/restart in a reasonable time frame. They'd spend more time taking snapshots than actually computing.
Source: I'm doing my PhD in supercomputing.