Post-exascale supercomputing: research opportunities abound
Zuoning Chen, Jack J. Dongarra, Zhiwei Xu · Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering · 2018
Exascale supercomputing refers to the scientific research efforts and activities to build and use supercomputers that can perform scientific computing at the speed of exaflops, or 10 18 floating-point (64-bit) operations per second.Exascale supercomputing is a major milestone in surpassing the state-of-the-art standard of petascale supercomputing, i.e., 10 15 floating-point operations per second, established a decade ago in 2008.Exascale scientific computing research is already in full bloom worldwide.The USA leads this research and development direction, with federal government funding starting in as early as 2008.Japan, Europe, India, and China soon followed suit.The most recent focus on the field is in Europe, with 1.4 billion euros budgeted for building pre-exascale supercomputers by 2020, and an additional 2.7 billion euros proposed for building an exascale supercomputer by 2023 (Feldman, 2018).It is expected that multiple exascale supercomputers will become operational in the USA, Europe, and Asia by 2020-2024, supporting cutting edge research in many scientific fields.In this context, the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) organized a special issue of "Postexascale