Warning At SC13 That Supercomputing Will Plateau Without a Disruptive Technology 118
dcblogs writes "At this year's supercomputing conference, SC13, there is worry that supercomputing faces a performance plateau unless a disruptive processing tech emerges. 'We have reached the end of the technological era' of CMOS, said William Gropp, chairman of the SC13 conference and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gropp likened the supercomputer development terrain today to the advent of CMOS, the foundation of today's standard semiconductor technology. The arrival of CMOS was disruptive, but it fostered an expansive age of computing. The problem is 'we don't have a technology that is ready to be adopted as a replacement for CMOS,' said Gropp. 'We don't have anything at the level of maturity that allows you to bet your company on.' Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, and head of an international exascale software effort, said large supercomputer system prices have topped off at about $100 million 'so performance gains are not going to come from getting more expensive machines, because these are already incredibly expensive and powerful. So unless the technology really has some breakthroughs, we are imagining a slowing down.'"
Although carbon nanotube based processors are showing promise (Stanford project page; the group is at SC13 giving a talk about their MIPS CNT processor).
on the nature of disruptive... (Score:5, Insightful)
my intuition tells me that disruptive technologies are precisely that because people don't anticipate them coming along nor do they anticipate the changes that will follow their introduction. not that people can't see disruptive tech ramping up, but often they don't.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are actually a half-decent number of 'supercomputers' -depending on how you define that term- in the private sector. From 'simple' ones that do rendering for animation companies to ones that model airflow for vehicles to ones that crunch financial numbers to.. well, lots of things, really. Are they as large as the biggest National faciltiies? Of course not - that's where the next generation of business-focused systems get designed and tested and models and methods get developed and tested.
It is indeed the case that far simpler systems ran early nuclear weapon design, yes, but that's like saying far simpler desktops had 'car racing games' -- when, in reality, the quality of those applications has changed incredibly. Try playing an old racing game on a C64 vs. a new one now and you'd probably not get that much out of the old one. Try doing useful, region-specific climate models with an old system and you're not going to get much out of it. Put a newer model with much higher resolution, better subgrid models and physics options, and the ability to accurately and quickly do ensemble runs for a sensitivity analysis and, well, you're in much better territory scientifically.
So, in answer to "So what?", I say: "Without improvements in our tools (supercomputers), our progress in multiple scientific -and business- endeavors slows down. That's a pretty big thing."
Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP?
All our really big supercomputers today are adding a bunch of individual not-even-Krypto-the-wonderdog CPUs together, and then calling it a supercomputer. Have we reached the limits in that scaling? No.
We have reached the limits in the ability to solve big problems that aren't parallelizable, due to the inability to produce individual CPU machines in the supercomputer range, but like I said, that boat sailed years ago.
This looks like a funding fishing expedition for the carbon nanotube processor research that was highlighted at the conference.
Re:Didn't that boat sail with the Cray Y-MP? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is wrong on both counts. First, the CPUs built into supercomputers today are as good as anybody knows how to make one. True, they're not exotic, in that you can also buy one yourself for $700 on newegg. But they represent billions of dollars in design and are produced only on multi-billion dollar fabs. There is no respect in which they are not lightyears more advanced than any custom silicon cray ever put out.
Second, you are wrong that we are not reaching the limits of scaling these types of machines. Performance does not scale infinitely on realistic workloads. And budgets and power supply certainly do not scale infinitely.