HPC luminary Horst Simon, the Berkeley Lab Deputy Director, gave a marvelous talk at an HPC meetup event in San Francisco on Feb 10 covering power efficiency and the movement towards exascale computing.
Horst Simon (image courtesy YouTube)
Horst presented data and the conclusion that the June 2008 – June 2013 five-year span marks a turning point where the growth attributed to Moore’s law and parallelism are no longer providing the exponential growth that has been driving high-performance computing for six decades. The lack of turnover in the top ten machines, with this grouping remaining virtually unchanged for two years, provides one piece of supporting evidence.
The following slide shows both the potential and how far conventional computing has to go to reach the power efficency of the human brain. In short, Horst feels that an exascale computer puts us within reach of a real-time human brain scale simulation, but a million times on a million times less power efficient hardware. (Horst was co-author on the paper “The cat is out of the bag: cortical simulations with 10^9 neurons, 10^13 synapses“).
(image courtesy YouTube)
Horst does see a three of speed jumps that might help in the quest for an exascale machine:
- Many-core/accelerators
- 3D
- Silicon Photonics (SiPh)
(image courtesy YouTube)
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