1.2: Acceleration
Accelerating the Future of Computing Other Information:
Accelerating the Future of Computing -- Historically, the United States has pioneered advances in high-performance computing
(called high-end computing [HEC] in the NITRD Program). The HEC technical area encompasses all of the challenges of leading
this advancement, including not just better (e.g., massively scaled-up, more efficient and resilient) system hardware and
software, but also more efficient provisioning models (e.g., surge and cloud computing), improved mathematical and computer
science underpinnings for analysis, modeling, and visualization of multi-scale and ultra-scale data, and new programming environments
and tools for easier development and usability of advanced scientific applications. Where we are now -- the most powerful
Federal leadership systems have achieved petascale speeds (1,000 trillion floating-point calculations [flops] per second)
and are expected to reach the exascale (a quintillion flops, or 1018). At the same time, however, our current means of reaching
these everhigher computational speeds -- packing multiple processors into every computer chip -- is creating a crisis in our
ability to program system and application software to efficiently exploit the emerging multi-core and heterogeneous computing
architectures. Moreover, as the number of cores and components rises, the likelihood diminishes of correctly completing data-intensive
computations of increasing scale and complexity. In addition, the cost to power large HPC facilities is growing unsustainably
rapidly. Research needs -- the massive parallelism necessary to enable software to fully exploit the speeds and computational
capabilities of supercomputing systems with heterogeneous components and up to millions of microprocessors presents enormous
challenges for both system and application designers. Developing robust code that can be partitioned into many parallel subroutines
for efficient multi-core processing and then reintegrating the results as final output, require breakthrough advances in the
underlying mathematics, design, and engineering of HEC software. The goal of making HEC environments easier to use and more
productive, reducing time to solution, remains elusive; even at today's levels of system complexity, down time due to software
issues is rising as a proportion of total operational costs. One promising R&D avenue is resilience -- concepts and technologies
enabling a HEC system to continue to function amid software faults, anomalies, and errors, and to alert operators about problems
without necessitating a shutdown. Also critical to the long-term future of supercomputing is research in technological approaches
to reduce the steadily rising energy demands of large-scale HEC systems and facilities, which typically consume many megawatts
per year for operations and cooling. Because advances to change this unsustainable energy-use trajectory may arise from multiple
research fields, the search for scientific breakthroughs must be pursued across the board: in power management and heat dissipation
technologies; new materials such as nanoscale composites; novel power-saving platform and system architectures; computational
technologies and methods such as spin-based logic and cloud computing; and next-generation computing concepts such as quantum
information science. Advances in nano, biological, and quantum sciences also may lead the way to radically different system
architectures and computational methods, providing the basis for next-generation computing at all scales.
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