Exascale machines Sample Clauses

Exascale machines. HPC platforms have seen their performances increase over the past years and are reaching a plateau. At the core level, the frequency, i.e. processor speed, together with the cache, has increased from 1.1GHz to 3.2 GHz and has almost reached an upper bound. At the same time, CPUs are now able to execute several instructions per cycle, introducing thus a first level of parallelism. At the node level, the memory bandwidth continued to grow hand in hand with the processor speed, to keep the processor busy. A race over the miniaturisation of processor is leading towards more populated chips but with several constrains: technology for miniaturisation and heat dissipation. One other important key point is that for many high-performance applications, I/O performance is a blocking factor. I/O controls the amount of data that can be saved on disk and enables checkpoint files that can be written to prevent system failure which will become more crucial as HPC platforms continue growing in size and complexity. Therefore, I/O performances is already identified as key due to their significant impact on data intensive applications. The first special-purpose exascale machines are likely to be for a small set of applications, where the platforms themselves are built via co-design principles. The issue of adopting co-design strategies is an extremely important one when it comes to the transition to exascale high-performance computing. It is based on developing partnerships with computer vendors and application scientists and engaging them in a highly collaborative and iterative design process well before a given system is available for commercial use. The process is built around identifying leading edge, high-impact scientific applications and providing concrete optimisation targets. CompBioMed actively promotes HemeLB as a target application program, since it is one of very few applications that currently utilises multi-petaflop computing platforms to answer key scientific questions, and is actively being optimised for the emerging exascale. Specifically, it is hoped that HemeLB is part of the co-design process for the future Aurora platform at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, in the US, where Xxxxxx is likely to be a pure Intel machine with their own specially developed accelerator technology. The first generic exascale machines are likely to be tightly coupled heterogeneous clusters of many-core/multi-core SMPs, and smaller clusters of accelerators, such as GPUs...