Accelerated Computing Emerges as Booster Rocket Taking Us to Age of Exacale

Another supercomputing show, another performance record, courtesy this week of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit system, the first to smash through the 100-petaflop barrier. But behind that headline at Frankfurt’s International Supercomputing show is a broader story about how the tectonic plates of the supercomputing world are shifting. As Moore’s Law continues to slow, accelerated computing clearly emerged at ISC as the booster rocket that will soon propel us into the age of exascale computing. Consider: Most of the new processing power on the just-released Top500 list comes from GPUs, which provide 95 percent of Summit’s flops.