by Anton Shilov
The next big thing for supercomputers are projected to be exascale machines. The leading chip designers are working on technologies that will enable the next leap in the high-performance computing space. According to an HPC expert from the University of Tennessee, in exascale systems will require new central processors, graphics processors or hybrids that combine both onto the same piece of silicon. But, Cell chips, which are heterogeneous multi-core processors, are dead end.

Building an exaFLOPS machine is a huge challenge. Even Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. – whose x86 central processing units (CPUs) power the absolute majority of supercomputers – admit that construction of a machine capable of performing quintillion floating point operations per second (1018 exaFLOPS) or more using x86 chips is hardly an executable task. As a result, AMD is trying to incorporate special FireStream compute accelerators (which are based on the massively parallel graphics processing units [GPUs]) into high-performance computing systems, whereas Intel is working on such accelerators, first of which is code-named Knights Corner and is projected to be released sometime in 2012 or 2013.

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