Scientific computing must become less rigid and power hungry as researchers seek new ways to model and understand the real world, a climatologist argues.
In a commentary published this week in the journal Nature, climate researcher Tim Palmer asserted that “we should question whether all scientific computations need to be performed deterministically — that is, always producing the same output given the same input — and with the same high level of precision. I argue that for many applications they do not.”
Furthermore, he argued that excessive power demands would slow the emergence of exascale computing.
“The main obstacle to building a commercially viable ‘exascale’ computer is not the flop rate itself but the ability to achieve this rate without excessive power consumption,” Palmer noted, citing preliminary estimates that exascale machines would consume about 100 megawatts, or the output of a small power station. Hence, a key challenge is making exascale computers more energy efficient.
The full article is available on HPCwire’s sister publication, EnterpriseTech.