100-Petaflop Supercomputers Predicted By 2017

[Doctor Q]

Informationweek article

Jack Dongarra, a computing expert at the University of Tennessee who helped design the technology used in testing systems on the Top 500 list, said he expects more 10-petaflop-plus systems next year. "Everything is moving along according to Moore's law, so things are doubling every 18 months, roughly," Dongarra told InformationWeek.

Dongarra predicted computer makers in 2017 will have 100-petaflop systems, with "exascale" systems between 2018 and 2020. An exascale, or extreme-scale, computer is expected to be a thousand times faster than a petascale system. "All of these things are dependent on funding," Dongarra said in an interview. "This will happen if the funding is in place for those machines."​

100 petaflops is 10^17 FLoating-point OPperations/Second.

I'll be sure to buy a desktop 100 petaflop Mac so I can read my email much faster than I can now.

Seriously, it's incredible to think about the types of simulations they'll be able to run, including much more sophisticated weather models. However, this article said that we'll need 1 zettaflops for full weather simulation. That's 10^21 operations/second!

 

[xUKHCx]

Geeze with a machine that fast surely we can finally answer the question "Shall I buy now or wait?"

 

[gkarris]

Hey, as long as I can play "Asteroids", I'm happy...

 

[dXTC]

Interesting article. It's fascinating and funny how computer technology progresses.

James Lileks, a news columnist and news ephemera Website owner, has a little section of his Web "museum" with pictures from vintage mainframe computer advertisements, replete with his signature offbeat commentary. One depicted a Control Data 3500, and his final comment on it was: "Remember: your iPod has more storage capacity than everything in this room."

 

[Tilpots]

However, this article said that we'll need 1 zettaflops for full weather simulation. That's 10^21 operations/second!

10^21 operations per second and it'll still be wrong.

I don't think the weatherman is shaking in his boots just yet.

 

[rdowns]

Angry Birds will kick ass on that.

 

[eRondeau]

I wonder if there's a "law" (aka rule of thumb) that defines how far ahead "cutting edge" supercomputer processing speeds are, versus "typical" consumer systems and mobile devices. In other words, is today's fastest supercomputer 10,000X as fast as a current iMac, which in turn is 100X as fast as a typical iPhone. I think it would be very interesting to chart that graph historically -- to see that today's iPhone is perhaps twice as fast as the first CRAY-1, and roughly equivalent to a PowerMac G3.

 

[patrick0brien]

I think it would be particularly interesting to chart it back to the computer on the LEM of Apollo 11.

I remember something about the IBM Thinkpad 760XL I had in 1997 being something like 1,600x faster than it.

 

[crackpip]

It is amazing. It seems like just yesterday I was excited about our team getting time on the Japanese Earth Simulator. Now, as we're getting proposals together for Blue Waters, we need to show our code performance would scale to thousands of cores-- it's like having a dedicated Earth Simulator of our own.

I also love the line on having the power to predict the path a tornado would take. I think someone at IBM is BS'ing on that one. Even if the numerical schemes and parameterizations were up to the task (which they aren't), I bet the computational power would have to be much greater.

fun stuff...

crackpip

 

[Doctor Q]

If one of those new supercomputers had a few minutes to spare it could solve all possible protein folding configurations, cure all neurodegenerative diseases, and still have time for a game of Jeopardy!.

 

[Doctor Q]

Looks like we won't have to wait as long as predicted.

News: China surpassing U.S. with 54.9 petaflop supercomputer

A petaflop is 10^15 floating point operations per second.

The Chinese supercomputer, named Tianhe-2, is more than twice the speed of the fastest U.S. supercomputer (TITAN at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Tianhe-2 has 32,000 multicore Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge chips and 48,000 Xeon Phi co-processor boards housed in 162 cabinets, with a proprietary interconnect named TH Express-2 that uses a fat tree topology. Software runs on the Kylin Linux operating system.

Industry experts have reported that China wants to produce an exascale system (one that does 10^18 floating point operations per second) before 2020 while the United States is not expected to produce one until about 2025.

 

[S.B.G]

Is that the computer they keep using to try and hack into my WordPress sites over and over again?

 

[kryten2]

If one of those new supercomputers had a few minutes to spare it could solve all possible protein folding configurations, cure all neurodegenerative diseases, and still have time for a game of Jeopardy!.

Jeopardy? It will start a Global Thermonuclear War game and hopefully at the end when it concludes it's "a strange game" will it offer to play "a nice game of chess".

 

[the8thark]

Or this is the slow march towards Judgement Day. Only time will tell.