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%T A Personal Perspective on the State of HPC in 2013
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%A  Christopher C.R. Jones
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%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.