Supercomputing: To Infinity and Beyond – Are we flying or are we falling with style?

At this meeting last year, I opined several times on a few of the issues surrounding the prevailing USG procurement models and the consequences of them on the HPC vendor community.  In John West’s HPC Wire article entitled “HPC Innovation in the Era of ‘Good Enough’”, John took the next step of investigation and documentation of some free thinking the industry on this subject.  The article ended with a comment from Joe Landman that until the nation’s innovation stewards chart a different course, maybe “good enough” is all we can hope for, referring to the relatively anomalous and amorphous “they”, a group worthy of attention of a conspiracy theorist.

In the year since the last Newport meeting, little if any dialogue has progressed on this subject, certainly not enough to have either made a change or challenged those to change.  Perhaps this is because “we” aren’t taking the opportunity to drive an agenda to “them”.  In this time of challenged economics, it is certainly easy to take the eye off the ball and to let this subject ignominiously coast into oblivion.  However, if we can avoid falling into this trap, we will reap fantastic benefits.  This community has done a great deal to raise the awareness to the fact that computational science is the oil of future innovation in science and engineering.  To proactively address the challenges we are facing in HPC innovation by both the vendor and end user communities will result in a much needed surge of innovation.  In the US, this would mean greater differentiation and thus more competiveness.

In this talk, I will briefly recap the trends and challenges facing a continuity of performance growth along with baseline technology trends.  I will then present a proposed framework where the HPC community could drive change over the next couple of years.  Here, the challenges of change will receive the primary focus of the talk.  And I will wrap up with a call for HPC segment participation (industry and end users) to refine the vision and accomplish the reformation.