3. The largest supercomputers today have one or two
petaflop/s peak performance with order 100,000 or
more processor cores. The number of processor cores
is two orders of magnitude higher compared to a
decade ago, and will likely increase much faster in
the coming decade, since the clock frequency of
processors will stagnate or even decrease in order to
limit power consumption. It is anticipated that
exaflop/s computers a decade from now will have
billions of threads.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. Currently technology for long-term data storage is
developing at an even slower pace than memory
and processors, and latencies as well as bandwidth
for input and output (I/O) will almost stagnate
compared to the continued rapid increase in compute
performance.
10.
11. The mean time to failure of any one of the
exorbitantly many components in a modern
supercomputer system can be short compared to the
time to solution of a simulation. The simulation
system, which includes the system software and the
application codes have to be resilient toward failure
of individual components. As processing power
continues to increase, error detection and correction
will become an issue as well, and simulation
methods will have to become fault tolerant.