Researchers Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories this week said they are building a 1 million trillion ‘flops’ computer that would perform a million trillion calulations per second.
An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second, the group said.
Such an exascale computer will be built under the auspices of a new laboratory called the Institute for Advanced Architectures that Sandia and Oak Ridge researchers would populate. The institute is funded for 2008 by congressional mandate at $7.4 million. It is supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Sandia is an NNSA laboratory.
The group wants to build its exascale computer to perform more accurate simulations for emerging science and engineering challenges in national defense, energy assurance, advanced materials, climate, and medicine.
One of the group’s goals is to reduce or eliminate the growing mismatch between data movement and processing speeds. Processing speed refers to the rapidity with which a processor can manipulate data to solve its part of a larger problem. Data movement refers to the act of getting data from a computer’s memory to its processing chip and then back again. The larger the machine, the farther away from a processor the data may be stored and the slower the movement of data, the group said.
“In an exascale computer, data might be tens of thousands of processors away from the processor that wants it,” says Sandia computer architect Doug Doerfler. “But until that processor gets its data, it has nothing useful to do. One key to scalability is to make sure all processors have something to work on at all times.”
Compounding the problem is new technology that has enabled designers to split a processor into first two, then four, and now eight cores on a single die. Some special-purpose processors have 24 or more cores on a die. The researchers suggest there might eventually be hundreds operating in parallel on a single chip.
Another problem for the institute is to reduce the amount of power needed to run a future exascale computer.
“The electrical power needed with today’s technologies would be many tens of megawatts — a significant fraction of a power plant. A megawatt can cost as much as a million dollars a year,” said Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. “We want to bring that down.”
Sandia and Oak Ridge will work together on these and other problems, he says. “Although all of our efforts will be collaborative, in some areas Sandia will take the lead and Oak Ridge may lead in others, depending on who has the most expertise in a given discipline.” In addition, a key component of the institute will be the involvement of industry and universities.
Layer 8 in a box
Check out these hot stories:
Name that parallel processing machine 100X faster than current PCs -- seriously
Prototype software sniffs out insider threats
