Exascale computing

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousandfold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008. (One exaflops is a thousand petaflops or a quintillion, 10¹⁸, floating point operations per second.) At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018.

Exascale computing would be considered as a significant achievement in computer engineering, for it is believed to be the order of processing power of the human brain at neural level (functional might be lower). It is, for instance, the target power of the Human Brain Project.

Development

In January 2012 Intel purchased the InfiniBand product line from QLogic for US $125 million in order to fulfill its promise of developing exascale technology by 2018.

The initiative has been endorsed by two US agencies: the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, both of which are part of the US Department of Energy. The technology would be useful in various computation-intensive research areas, including basic research, engineering, earth science, biology, materials science, energy issues, and national security.

The United States has put aside $126 million for exascale computing beginning in 2012.

Three projects aiming at developing technologies and software for exascale computing have been started in 2011 within the European Union. The CRESTA project (Collaborative Research into Exascale Systemware, Tools and Applications), the DEEP project (Dynamical ExaScale Entry Platform), and the project Mont-Blanc.

The Scalable, Energy-Efficient, Resilient and Transparent Software Adaptation (SERT) project, a major research project between the University of Manchester and the STFC Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, has been awarded almost £1million from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The SERT project was due to start in March 2015. It will be funded by EPSRC under the Software for the Future II programme, and the project will partner with the Numerical Analysis Group (NAG), Cluster Vision and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

In Japan, the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science is planning an exascale system for 2020, it will consume less than 30 megawatts.

In February 2013 the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity started Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program which envisions a new generation of superconducting supercomputers that operate at exascale speeds based on Superconducting logic. In December 2014 it announced a multi-year contract with International Business Machines, Raytheon BBN Technologies and Northrop Grumman to develop the technologies for C3 program.

Optalysys claim that it will be able to deliver an 17.1 exaflops optical computer by 2020.

On 29 July 2015, President Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing.

Following President Obama's executive order, Optalysys, a UK spin-out from the University of Cambridge confirmed that they were on course to develop an exascale optical computer by 2022.

The Indian Government has proposed to commit 2.5 billion USD to supercomputing research during the 12th five-year plan period (2012-2017). The project will be handled by Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Additionally, it was later revealed that India plans to develop a supercomputer with processing power in the exaflop range. It will be developed by C-DAC within the subsequent 5 years of approval.

The Supercomputer project has the backing of the Indian Government, which has set aside approximately $2 bn for its development, apart from support to the other major initiative of building and installing 100-150 supercomputers at the local, district and national levels under an Indian national programme.

Challenges

It has been recognized that enabling applications to fully exploit capabilities of Exascale computing systems is not straightforward. In fact, in June 2014, the stagnation of the Top500 supercomputer list had observers question the possibility of exascale systems by 2020.

See also

• Supercomputer
• Superconducting logic
• Big Data
• Metric prefix

External links

• America’s Next Generation Supercomputer: The Exascale Challenge: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, First Session, Wednesday, May 22, 2013.