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In addition, the general makeup of the machines will differ dramatically through the use of multiple central processing units and hybrid systems to overcome barriers limiting today's supercomputers. Tomorrow's exascale computers will have roughly a billion processors.
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We have to have the techniques and software to effectively use these machines on the most challenging science problems in the near future."Īccording to Dongarra, "Today's supercomputers have processor counts in the millions.
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"The exascale computers are going to be dramatically different than the computers we have today. "You can't wait for the exascale computers to be delivered and then start thinking about the software and algorithms," said Dongarra in a statement. Called the Parallel Runtime Scheduling and Execution Controller (PaRSEC), this aims to address the critical situation that is facing the supercomputing community due to the introduction of more complex supercomputer designs. That's why he's working on designing software that will make the next generation of supercomputers operational.ĭongarra recently received a million-dollar grant over three years from the US Department of Energy to find answers for these programming problems. Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and creator of the TOP500 supercomputer list, thinks we will have exascale computers and doesn't disagree with the second part of Simon's position.
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Leaving silliness aside, Simon pointed out that exascale supercomputing will fundamentally break "our current programming paradigm and computing ecosystem." In other words, even if we build the hardware, we won't be able to use it efficiently. How big is that? Well if you had a quintillion pennies, it would make up a cube about five miles to a side. Exascale computers will be about 1,000 times faster than today's top Linux-powered petascale supercomputers.
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