It seems clear that multicore will be playing a key role in modern supercomputing. Dan Reid’s blog posting (reproduced in CACM) titled When Petascale is Just Too Slow has a bit worth quoting at the end:

I believe it is time for us to move from our deus ex machina model of explicitly managed resources to a fully distributed, asynchronous model that embraces component failure as a standard occurrence. To draw a biological analogy, we must reason about systemic, organism health and behavior rather than cellular signaling and death, and not allow cell death (component failure) to trigger organism death (system failure). Such a shift in world view has profound implications for how we structure the future of international high-performance computing research, academic-government-industrial collaborations and system procurements.

Perhaps the necessities of programming very (very) large systems may force some of the software issues currently hamstringing multicore.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 11:30 am and is filed under Article, Hardware, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.