Massive Concurrency

The largest supercomputers today have one or twopetaflop/s peak performance with order 100,000 ormore processor cores. The number of processor coresis two orders of magnitude higher compared to adecade ago, and will likely increase much faster inthe coming decade, since the clock frequency ofprocessors will stagnate or even decrease in order tolimit power consumption. It is anticipated thatexaflop/s computers a decade from now will havebillions of threads.

Currently technology for long-term data storage isdeveloping at an even slower pace than memoryand processors, and latencies as well as bandwidthfor input and output (I/O) will almost stagnatecompared to the continued rapid increase in computeperformance.

The mean time to failure of any one of theexorbitantly many components in a modernsupercomputer system can be short compared to thetime to solution of a simulation. The simulationsystem, which includes the system software and theapplication codes have to be resilient toward failureof individual components. As processing powercontinues to increase, error detection and correctionwill become an issue as well, and simulationmethods will have to become fault tolerant.

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Source: http://www.hp2c.ch/initiative/hpcfacts/