Facts About High-Performance Computing

Massive Concurrency

The largest supercomputers today have one or two petaflop/s peak performance with order 100,000 or more processor cores. The number of processor cores is two orders of magnitude higher compared to a decade ago, and will likely increase much faster in the coming decade, since the clock frequency of processors will stagnate or even decrease in order to limit power consumption. It is anticipated that exaflop/s computers a decade from now will have billions of threads.

Less & Slower Memory Per Thread

Advances in memory sub-systems are much slower compared to the continued rapid developments in processor technologies. This has already resulted in high latencies compared to the instruction speed of the processors, and resulted in deep and complex memory hierarchies on today’s commodity processors. We might see even more levels of memory in the future, and we will certainly see a significant decrease in both the amount of memory per core (and/or thread) and the memory bandwidth per instruction/second and thread.

Only Slow Improvements Of Inter-Processor & Inter-Thread Communication

While interconnect bandwidth will continue to increase, these improvements will be slower than the increase in concurrency, resulting in a lower bandwidth per core or thread. Latencies will likely stagnate, and synchronization will not improve.

Stagnant I/O sub-systems

 Currently technology for long-term data storage is developing at an even slower pace than memory and processors, and latencies as well as bandwidth for input and output (I/O) will almost stagnate compared to the continued rapid increase in compute performance.

Resilience & Fault Tolerance

The mean time to failure of any one of the exorbitantly many components in a modern supercomputer system can be short compared to the time to solution of a simulation. The simulation system, which includes the system software and the application codes have to be resilient toward failure of individual components. As processing power continues to increase, error detection and correction will become an issue as well, and simulation methods will have to become fault tolerant.

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