Few people question that an ExaFLOP supercomputer will be built
in the coming years. But rather than write about the first
ExaFLOP system, I thought I would ponder the last one. If you
believe HPC veteran Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics &
Computing at Indiana University, quoted in his recent interview,
‘I Think We Will Never Reach Zettaflops’, one could postulate
that the last ExaFLOP system will never be built. But with all
challenging problems, it is good to get more than one opinion.
The title of Greg Papadopoulos’, recent talk, How to Design and
Build Your Very Own Exascale Computer makes ExaFLOP computing
sound almost trivial. Albeit Greg expands the concept of ExaFLOP
beyond pure supercomputing to ExaSCALE, including large systems
such as those that Google, eBay, or the HP Cloud may run in the
future. No matter what you think about the future of ExaFLOP and
ExaSCALE computing, the experts pretty much agree, improving the
performance/watt will be one of the key challenges. Using
today’s commerc