6 CHALLENGES OF FUTURE HIGH-END COMPUTING

Abstract: With the recent achievement of one teraflop/s (1012flop/s) on the ASCI Red system at Sandia National Laboratory in the U.S., many have asked what lies ahead for high-end scientific computing. The next major milestone is one petaflop/s (1015 flop/s). Systems capable of this level of performance may be available by 2010, assuming key technologies continue to advance at currently projected rates. This paper gives an overview of some of the challenges that need to be addressed to achieve this goal. One key issue is the question of whether or not the algorithms and applications anticipated for these systems possess the enormous levels of concurrency that will be required, and whether or not they possess the requisite data locality. In any event, new algorithms and implementation techniques may be required to effectively uti-lize these future systems. New approaches may also be required to program applications, analyze performance and manage systems of this scale