April 24-27, 2023
Theme: Is HPC at a Crossroads?
Since the advent of Moore’s law in 1965, the high performance computing community has been singularly focused on increasing available computational capabilities with each architectural generation. Arguably, the use of HPL as the standard ruler by which all machines are measured has fueled much of this focus on tera-, peta- and now exa-scale. We’ve spent more than a decade striving for, and now achieving, the goal of fielding an exaflop-capable machine, with more on the near-term horizon. But, for a variety of both technical and budgetary reasons, we haven’t yet been talking about the zetta-scale. Are we in a quandary of what might come next? At this crossroads that we face, is there a clear path on where our community should focus our collective efforts?
In very recent years, the awareness has increased of the opportunity space that the cloud providers and their technologies provide. HPC application developers are dipping their proverbial toes in the water as they explore the pros and cons of offloading some or all of their computational work into the cloud. HPC facilities are increasingly considering the advantages provided by some of the software technologies that cloud providers deploy. And the cloud has embraced hardware disaggregation faster than many of our monolithic procurements.
In very recent years, the awareness has increased of the opportunity space that the cloud providers and their technologies provide. HPC application developers are dipping their proverbial toes in the water as they explore the pros and cons of offloading some or all of their computational work into the cloud. HPC facilities are increasingly considering the advantages provided by some of the software technologies that cloud providers deploy. And the cloud has embraced hardware disaggregation faster than many of our monolithic procurements.