By Patrick Thibodeau
There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world’s most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.
Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless “what-if” scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren’t big enough — and a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system.
Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world’s fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops.
