Advantages and disadvantages of the new generation of Supercomputers

RickStevens, Argonne National Lab’s Associate Director for Computing, Environmental, and Life Sciences, proclaimed the main advantages, disadvantages and challenges of the new billion-core supercomputers. The primary problem of exascale computing is power consumption but the challenge of working with such capacities is pushing technology forward to new solutions.

Stevens states that the usage of available computing technologies on billion-core systems is spending gigawatts of energy. The largest energy producers in the United States produce only a few gigawatts, therefore, every supercomputer would have to posses its own energy plant. Another problem is the reliability of such systems. It is proved that with the increasing number of cores increases the likelihood of system failure. One possible solution is to develop intelligent software for managing computer clusters. The idea lies in the distribution of workload in order to better use the capacity of clusters. Bill Nitzberg, CTO for Altair Engineering’s PBS Works division, concludes that the focus of the development of supercomputers will be placed on smarter use of available energy rather than a mere reduction. Management softwares for HPC systems have already implemented solutions that save energy. For example, "Green Provisionig" functionality in PBS product uses precise monitoring tools that know when to start or reset depending on the temperature in data centers and thus reduce energy consumption up to 20 percent. Despite the rapidly evolving technology, new inventions in the area of ​​smarter energy utilization are still to be invented so we can face the challenges of the exascale era. More information can be found at hpcwire web site.