On the Inevitability of Integrated HPC Systems and How they will Change HPC System Operations
Martin Schulz, Dieter August Kranzlmüller, Laura Brandon Schulz, Carsten Trinitis, Josef Weidendorfer · 2021
High-Performance Computing (HPC) is at an inflection point in its evolution. General-purpose architectures approach limits in terms of speed and power/energy, requiring the development of specialized architectures to deliver accelerated performance. Additionally, the arrival of new user communities and workloads---including machine learning, data analytics, and quantum simulation---increases the breadth of application characteristics we need to support, putting pressure on the complexity of the architectural portfolio. At the same time, data movement has been identified as a main culprit of energy waste, pushing hardware designers towards a tighter integration of the different technologies. The resulting integrated systems offer great opportunities in terms of power/performance tradeoffs, but also lead to challenges on the software side.