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Currently, the world's most powerful supercomputers can ramp up to more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or a petaflop. But computing power is not growing as fast as it has in the past. On Monday, the June 2015 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world revealed the beginnings of a plateau in performance growth.
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The development rate began tapering off around 2008. Between 2010 and 2013, aggregate increases ranged between 26 percent and 66 percent. And on this June's list, there was a mere 17 percent increase from last November.
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Despite the slowdown, many computational scientists expect performance to reach exascale, or more than a billion billion operations per second, by 2020.
Hmm, if they reach exascale computing will the weatherman finally be able to predict if it's going to rain this afternoon? Because he sucks at that now.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday July 20 2015, @08:28PM
The number of computing clusters is growing but the largest clusters aren't growing particularly fast. This is due to the Chinese adding more nodes to their ludicrously scalable switching fabric when any party gets close to attaining the record.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 20 2015, @09:05PM
It is a myth that supercomputers are built simply to top the LINPACK list. National prestige is a very small part of what they are used for.
The Chinese would have added nodes sooner [soylentnews.org] if it weren't for the recent and wrongheaded export ban to their supercomputing centers. Now they are going to add Chinese nodes instead. Heck, Intel should sue the feds over this.
Did we ban exports because we wanted to beat their record? Nope, we did it because Tianhe is used for simulating nuclear weapons and explosions... just as our Department of Energy supercomputers do.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:53PM
The same story with India. The US banned export of HPC tech to India because India was (still is) chummier with Soviet Ruskitstan. Then India developed their own HPC tech instead of buying American stuff.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:31AM
The Chinese would have added nodes sooner if it weren't for the recent and wrongheaded export ban to their supercomputing centers. ... we did it because Tianhe is used for simulating nuclear weapons and explosions... just as our Department of Energy supercomputers do.
how is trying to slow the advancement of nuclear weaponry wrongheaded? do you think anyone should have more deadly nuclear weapons?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:47AM
That's because you are dumb. Imagine yourself sitting next to North Korea (Pakistan, Israel, etc.)
(Score: 3, Informative) by http on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:49AM
It's not wrong headed, but it also is absolutely not what's intended, or happening. It's a hypocritical excuse, as NRL still operates, and an irrelevant excuse, as China is boosting its domestic manufacture.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:35AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:48AM
It's not the intent that's wrongheaded, it's the measure. It is wrongheaded in the same way as it is wrongheaded to try to stop a flood by setting the area you want to protect on fire, on the theory that the fire will stop the water.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Friday July 24 2015, @02:03PM
As someone who was previously involved with a large renderfarm [soylentnews.org], I confirm that it was upgraded to gigabit Ethernet switches solely to improve benchmarks. When a renderfarm node reads a .rib file and writes a .dpx file every 45 minutes or so, gigabit Ethernet makes minimal difference to performance.
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(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Monday July 20 2015, @09:40PM
Is there in general an allocation of funding towards flexibility and scalability rather than raw flops?
I could imagine many organizations getting to the point where they're primarily focused on managing access and maintenance rather than building out the capacity needed for specific projects. Amazon's platform seemed like it was produced as a byproduct of reaching a point like that.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.