The Day After Tomorrow: The Looming Post-Exascale Crisis

摘要

This is the best of times for high-performance computing. Our simulations continue to grow in complexity and sophistication, and they drive progress in the physical sciences and engineering, improving the world in myriad ways. Around the globe multiple plans are underway to achieve exascale performance by the early 2020's. Although considerable challenges remain, it seems that we can get to the exascale with familiar technologies and programming models. But while the immediate future looks bright, significant problems lie ahead. With Dennard scaling long-dead, device technologies won't save us from crippling power requirements for a 10 exaflop machine. And with Moore's Law sputtering towards end-of-life, performance is not improving much with each new generation of chips. There has been considerable excitement about the promise of quantum computing, reversible computing and other exotic concepts. But it seems likely that these will not become general-purpose approaches to computing for many years, if ever.