At a meeting of the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) of the Department of Energy (DoE) on July 27, the status of the US exascale initiative was reviewed.
Steve Binkley Associate Director, DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, concluded in his presentation that the next generation of advancements will require Extreme Scale Computing of 100-1,000X capabilities of today's computers with a similar physical size and power footprint. This poses significant challenges for power consumption, high parallelism, reliability. Extreme Scale Computing cannot be achieved by a "business-as-usual", evolutionary approach. Hence it is necessary to initiate partnerships with U.S. computer vendors to perform the required engineering, research and development for system architectures for capable exascale computing. Exascale systems will be based on marketable technology; it will be not a "one off" system. They must be productive systems, usable by scientists and engineers.
Read further...