U.S. and other countries have been in a race for exascale. The thing holding us back isn't funding or political will: exascale is so ridiculously hard that it requires fundamentally different architectures. The main issues are making our CPU's do more work, eliminating memory bottlenecks, and dramatically improving energy efficiency of both. It's just very tough, technical challenges that might also have to operate on process nodes that are themselves tough.
Rexx Computing is one attempt whose founder posts here a lot [except in one thread dedicated to it lol]. I'm curious if any other exascale researchers read HN and can post their concepts as it's probably interesting stuff. Here's some links for readers interested in this stuff.
Step 1: Nuclear test ban treaty. Step 2: Avoid nuclear test disasters. Step 3: Maintain military status quo.
Notice step 3 implies international stability and hence profit. NNSA stresses computation so heavily because stockpile stewardship cannot be done by noncomputational means.
Interesting point. Exascale is a lot more than that though: many stakeholders. And, even if none, it's still going to get funded as another international pissing contest (see Top 500). ;)
U.S. and other countries have been in a race for exascale. The thing holding us back isn't funding or political will: exascale is so ridiculously hard that it requires fundamentally different architectures. The main issues are making our CPU's do more work, eliminating memory bottlenecks, and dramatically improving energy efficiency of both. It's just very tough, technical challenges that might also have to operate on process nodes that are themselves tough.
Rexx Computing is one attempt whose founder posts here a lot [except in one thread dedicated to it lol]. I'm curious if any other exascale researchers read HN and can post their concepts as it's probably interesting stuff. Here's some links for readers interested in this stuff.
LLNL gives data on exascale and its challenges https://asc.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/exascale-white.pdf
Also describes problems but skip to Venray's TOMI approach http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4368705/The-future-...
Rexx Computing's approach http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/12/the-little-chip-that-c...
Intel's relatively conventional approach http://www.exascale-computing.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/...
Architecture from Univ of Texas and NVIDIA https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/skeckler/pubs/SC_2014_Exasca...
Boise exploring non-Von-Neuman with ParalleX http://cswarm.nd.edu/news-events/assets/PSAAP_II_Kick-off_CS...
Same group enlightens on details that all fight with http://sites.ieee.org/boise-cs/files/2015/04/Thomas-Sterling...
Bonus: 1,000 core, cache-coherent, optical interconnect. Sort of thing might be useful in exascale. http://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/67490
Have fun with these. Submit a link if I left out any chip architecture in exascale race that's pretty cool.