Keeping "Performance" in HPC
Rob Farber · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2007
Virtualization, discussed in last months column, and the advent of many-core processors (chips containing tens or hundreds of cores) are two new technologies on the HPC horizon that appear to be pieces of the sustained petascale supercomputer puzzles. As usual, unresolved performance problems at current HPC performance levels will be accentuated in the future - and by these technologies - as we scale to ever faster systems. Without going into a technical deep-dive, I will discuss some of the issues related to virtualization and many-core processors that need to be understood when looking forward into the HPC future. We all want to keep the “performance” in HPC.