HPC in the Multicore Era - Challenges and Opportunities

Orator

David Barkai (Intel) HPC Symposium

Abstract

The application of "Moore's Law" still provides us with doubling the performance every generation through higher density of transistors on the chip, but also with the help of architectural innovation. What is a new phenomenon is that since the introduction of multicore the potential performance increase will not occur without assistance from the software and applications developers community. The challenges arise from the ever increasing level of concurrency, and the innovation required to maintain an adequate compute-bandwidth-latency balance. This talk will cover the current state of affairs in HPC, the hardware and software challenges, some approaches being studied to resolve them - new approaches to memory and IO systems, examination of more complex programming models (i.e., heterogeneous and hybrid); and the scientific discovery opportunities that will open up when those barriers are overcome.