Industry Expert Blogs

Supercomputing 2023 brought together some of the brightest minds in the field of high-performance computing, showcasing the latest in exascale computing and the challenges faced in the pursuit of next-generation advances in computing. Talks by Scott Atchley from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Stephen Pawlowski from Intel stood out for their valuable perspectives on the current state of supercomputing and future directions for the industry.

Frontier: Exploring Exascale

Scott Atchley, Distinguished R&D Staff Member and Chief Technology Officer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National Center for Computational Science

Scott Atchley’s talk delved into the US supercomputer “Frontier” and its journey to meet the challenges of exascale computing. The goal was ambitious: achieving performance levels 1000 times higher than petascale systems deployed in 2008, all within a budget of 4x-6x compared to the previous generation.

Challenges identified by DARPA in 2008 when planning for Frontier included energy and power, memory and storage, concurrency and locality, and resiliency. Frontier successfully addressed these challenges, showcasing advancements in power efficiency, memory capacity and bandwidth, concurrency management, and resiliency. However, the need for a budget 4x-6x higher than the previous generation arose due to technology costs not declining by 1000x, which limited the growth of many resources compared to the previous generation of supercomputers. Components like storage and memory, particularly with the use of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), proved more expensive.

The findings underscore the complexities of achieving exascale computing and the necessity of adapting to evolving technological landscapes, especially in the face of cost dynamics in storage and memory technologies.

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