Perhaps self-evident but among the benefits flowing from National Strategic Computing Initiative discussions are clarification of specific obstacles in the path to exascale and the forcing of specific choices to take to advance extreme scale computing. Doug Burger, director of hardware and devices at Microsoft Research (NASDAQ: MSFT), contributed an insightful blog with his takeaways from the NSCI Workshop held at the White House (Oct. 20-21).
The blog appears on CCC Blog (Computing Community Consortium) web site. Burger offers seven observations from the workshop. For example, “The scale and explosive growth rate of the cloud market was surprising to many of the attendees. The scale of the cloud market will enable investments in system design that are otherwise unaffordable. This shift may be analogous to how the growth in the PC market allowed the commodity (“killer micro”) CPUs to wipe out most of the supercomputing companies and custom vector machines starting in the early 1990s. The key question here is: will HPC systems have to shift to the cloud to be competitive?”
One can almost hear the anxiety shudders in boardrooms of HPC systems vendors; then again, it will perhaps create opportunity and could become an effective way to deliver HPC-as-a-service, something discussed at a NSCI panel at a recent HPC User Group conference. Interestingly, Burger also says there was a general feeling that quantum computing was viewed as “good long-term bet.”
Given the NSCI initial implementation plan is effectively due now and there’s a NSCI talk scheduled at SC15 (Wednesday afternoon), expectation for more detail are rising in the HPC community. Check out Burger’s blog (actually a contributed work to Helen Wright’s blog) at: http://www.cccblog.org/2015/11/03/another-perspective-on-the-white-house-nsci-workshop/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork