Paper Details

%T A Personal Perspective on the State of HPC in 2013
%A Christopher C.R. Jones
%E Peter H. Welch, Frederick R. M. Barnes, Jan F. Broenink, Kevin Chalmers, Jan Bækgaard Pedersen, Adam T. Sampson
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2013
%X This paper is fundamentally a personal perspective on the
   sad state of High Performance Computing (HPC, or what was
   known once as Supercomputing). It arises from the
   author\[rs]s current experience in trying to find computing
   technology that will allow codes to run faster: codes that
   have been painstakingly adapted to efficient performance on
   parallel computing technologies since around 1990, and have
   allowed effective 10\-fold increases in computing
   performance at 5 year HPC up\-grade intervals, but for which
   the latest high\-count multi\-core processor options fail to
   deliver improvement. The presently available processors may
   as well not have the majority of their cores as to use them
   actually slows the code \- hard\-won budget must be
   squandered on cores that will not contribute. The
   present situation is not satisfactory: there are very many
   reasons why we need computational response, not merely
   throughput. There are a host of cases where we need a
   large, complex simulation to run in a very short time. A
   simplistic calculation based on the nominal performance
   of some of the big machines with vast numbers of cores would
   lead one to believe that such rapid computation would be
   possible. The nature of the machines and the programming
   paradigms, however, remove this possibility. Some of the
   ways in which the computer science community could mitigate
   the hardware shortfalls are discussed, with a few more off
   the wall ideas about where greater compute performance might
   be found.

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