SAN FRANCISCO—Thanks to parallelism and technology scaling, exascale computing will become a reality before the decade is out, but it won't live up to its full potential unless fundamental power consumption barriers are overcome, according to Intel Fellow Shekhar Borkar.
Delivering a keynote address at the Semicon West fab tool vendor tradeshow here Tuesday (July 10), Borkar noted that exascale computing is expected to become a reality by the end of the decade. By about 2018, engineers are expected to create an exascale supercomputer—capable of a 1,000-fold performance improvement compared with today's state-of-the-art petaflop systems.
If history is any guide, about 10 years after the existence of exascale supercomputers, the technology will find its way into PCs and then, eventually, into mobile systems, Borkar said.
But if current trends hold true, an exascale computer will consume vast amounts of power, according to Borkar. The formidable challenge, he said, is to create an exascale computing system that consumes only 20 megawatts (MW) of power.
If engineers can use new technology to create an exascale system that consumes only 20 MW of power, the same technology can also be used to dramatically lower the power consumption of lower performance systems, to the point where giga-scale systems consuming only 20 milliwatts of power can be used in small toys and mega-scale systems that consume only 20 microwatts could be used in heart monitors.
"A mega-scale machine was a supercomputer back in the 60s," Borkar added.
Intel Fellow Shekhar Borkar.speaks at the Semicon West tradeshow Tuesday.