Enabling Technologies for Petaflops Computing (Scientific and Engineering Computation) - Softcover

Sterling, Thomas; Messina, Paul; Smith, Paul H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262691760 ISBN 13: 9780262691765

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1995

Synopsis

Building a computer ten times more powerful than all the networked computing capability in the United States is the subject of this book by leading figures in the high performance computing community. It summarizes the near-term initiatives, including the technical and policy agendas for what could be a twenty-year effort to build a petaFLOP scale computer. (A FLOP -- Floating Point OPeration -- is a standard measure of computer performance and a PetaFLOP computer would perform a million billion of these operations per second.) Chapters focus on four interrelated areas: applications and algorithms, device technology, architecture and systems, and software technology. While a petaFLOPS machine is beyond anything within contemporary experience, early research into petaFLOPS system design and methodologies is essential to U.S. leadership in all facets of computing into the next century. The findings reported here explore new and fertile ground. Among them: construction of an effective petaFLOPS computing system will be feasible in two decades, although effectiveness and applicability will depend on dramatic cost reductions as well as innovative approaches to system software and programming methodologies; a mix of technologies such as semiconductors, optics, and possibly cryogenics will be required; and while no fundamental paradigm shift in system architecture is expected, active latency management will be essential, requiring a high degree of fine-grain parallelism and the mechanisms to exploit it. Scientific and Engineering Computation series.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Sterling is Senior Scientist, USRA Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park. Paul Messina is Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing and Director, Caltech Concurrent Supercomputing Facilities, California Institute of Technology, and Program Manager for High Performnce Computing, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Paul H. Smith is Program Manager, High Performance Computing and Communications, NASA Headquarters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262691760
• ISBN 13: 9780262691765
• Binding: Paperback