Supersizing the supercomputers: What’s next?

Supercomputers excel at highly calculation-intensive tasks, such as molecular modeling and large-scale simulations, and have enabled significant scientific breakthroughs.


Yet supercomputers themselves are subject to technological advancements and redesigns that allow them to keep pace with the science they support.

The current vision of future supercomputers calls for them to be very heterogeneous–for example, rather than a central processing unit (CPU) with memory, disk and interconnect, the CPU will contain cores of smaller CPUs making up a larger whole–and have different types of processors, such as vectors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The location and type of memory will be more complex as well.

High performance components–encapsulated chunks of software that perform specific tasks–will be coupled to a dynamic framework that allows the scientists and the software to dynamically determine the algorithms or modifications to algorithms that will perform well on a particular architecture.

Multiple levels of parallelism will be explored, including parallelism at the component level, parallelism within the component, parallelism within a subroutine and threading.

These supercomputers of the future will provide orders of magnitude more computing power, but their increasing complexity also requires experts in computational science, mathematics and computer science working together to develop the software needed for the science.

Media Contact

Brenda Pittsley EurekAlert!

More Information:

http://www.pnl.gov

All latest news from the category: Information Technology

Here you can find a summary of innovations in the fields of information and data processing and up-to-date developments on IT equipment and hardware.

This area covers topics such as IT services, IT architectures, IT management and telecommunications.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors