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Supersizing the supercomputers: What's next?
August 31, 2005Supercomputers excel at highly calculation-intensive tasks, such as molecular modeling and large-scale simulations, and have enabled significant scientific breakthroughs.
Yet supercomputers themselves are subject to technological advancements and redesigns that allow them to keep pace with the science they support.
The current vision of future supercomputers calls for them to be very heterogeneous-for example, rather than a central processing unit (CPU) with memory, disk and interconnect, the CPU will contain cores of smaller CPUs making up a larger whole-and have different types of processors, such as vectors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The location and type of memory will be more complex as well.
High performance components-encapsulated chunks of software that perform specific tasks-will be coupled to a dynamic framework that allows the scientists and the software to dynamically determine the algorithms or modifications to algorithms that will perform well on a particular architecture.
Multiple levels of parallelism will be explored, including parallelism at the component level, parallelism within the component, parallelism within a subroutine and threading.
These supercomputers of the future will provide orders of magnitude more computing power, but their increasing complexity also requires experts in computational science, mathematics and computer science working together to develop the software needed for the science.
DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
High performance components-encapsulated chunks of software that perform specific tasks-will be coupled to a dynamic framework that allows the scientists and the software to dynamically determine the algorithms or modifications to algorithms that will perform well on a particular architecture.
Multiple levels of parallelism will be explored, including parallelism at the component level, parallelism within the component, parallelism within a subroutine and threading.
These supercomputers of the future will provide orders of magnitude more computing power, but their increasing complexity also requires experts in computational science, mathematics and computer science working together to develop the software needed for the science.
DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Supercomputers Current Events and Supercomputers News RSSQuantum computing spins closer
The promise of quantum computing is that it will dramatically outshine traditional computers in tackling certain key problems: searching large databases, factoring large numbers, creating uncrackable codes and simulating the atomic structure of materials.
Quantum computers could excel in modeling chemical reactions
Quantum computers would likely outperform conventional computers in simulating chemical reactions involving more than four atoms, according to scientists at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Haverford College.
Oak Ridge supercomputer is the world's fastest for science
A Cray XT high-performance computing system at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the world's fastest supercomputer for science.
News Bits About Qubits: Scientists Store and Retrieve Data Inside an Atom
Another step towards quantum computing - the Holy Grail of data processing and storage - was achieved when an international team of scientists that included researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to successfully store and retrieve information using the nucleus of an atom.
Future Risk of Hurricanes: The Role of Climate Change
Researchers are homing in on the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea to assess the likely changes, between now and the middle of the century, in the frequency, intensity, and tracks of these powerful storms. Initial results are expected early next year.
IU sends innovative technology to Antarctica to speed polar research
Environmental scientists studying the world's shrinking polar ice sheets will soon get a substantial boost in computing power thanks to IU's Polar Grid Project.
IMPACTS: On the Threshold of Abrupt Climate Changes
Abrupt climate change is a potential menace that hasn't received much attention. That's about to change. Through its Climate Change Prediction Program, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) recently launched IMPACTS - Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate Transitions - a program led by William Collins of Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division (ESD) that brings together six national laboratories to attack the problem of abrupt climate change, or ACC.
Climate Computer Modeling Heats Up
New "petascale" computer models depicting detailed climate dynamics, and building the foundation for the next generation of complex climate models, are in the offing.
Study shows clumps and streams of dark matter in inner regions of the Milky Way
Using one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to simulate the halo of dark matter that envelopes our galaxy, researchers found dense clumps and streams of the mysterious stuff lurking in the inner regions of the halo, in the same neighborhood as our solar system.
Room temperature superconductivity
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have for the first time identified a key component to unravelling the mystery of room temperature superconductivity, according to a paper published in today's edition of the scientific journal Nature.
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