The Shape of Things to Come: The Future of Microarchitectures for HPC Systems
The world of HPC systems is undergoing a transformation, especially as we move towards petaflops and beyond. While the reliance by most of the Top 500 systems will continue to be based on the best of commercial microprocessors, the very highest end, especially when targeting non-traditional applications, will be forced into other approaches.
This talk looks at this future by developing and examining three possible evolutions in architectures for HPC: today's "physics-limited" very power-hungry multi-core monsters that are hitting some significant limitations, a maturing multi-threading and tiling path that should provide more nimble systems in the near term, and some thoughts on alternative evolutionary paths that we may have ignored up to this point.
The focus will be on where technology is both driving us, the new opportunities that are opening up, and how all of this may play against applications and alternative programming models.
Peter M. Kogge, University of Notre Dame