News & Announcements

October 21, 2009

"Rick Stevens Talks About the Future of Supercomputing"

I first met Rick Stevens at SC96, although I doubt he'd have cause to remember that meeting. He was a judge in the category of the HPC Challenge that I had entered (heterogeneous computing). We only spent a few minutes together as judge and contestant before he moved on to the other teams, but his comments and questions were perceptive; the meeting made an impression on me.

Today Rick Stevens is the Associate Director for Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory. He is also a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, a senior fellow of the Argonne/University of Chicago Computation Institute, and he heads the Argonne/Chicago Futures Lab (the group that developed the Access Grid collaboration system). And that just scratches the surface.

He is widely engaged in thinking about, developing, and teaching a host of technologies, from computer architecture and parallel computing to collaboration technology and virtual reality. All of which come together in his passion for reaching the next milestone in computing history: the exaflops computer.

Argonne is gearing up for their next generation system from IBM. They aren't ready to talk too much about that system just yet (look for more news closer to SC09), but Stevens would say that they expect the system to be in the 10-20 PFLOPS range. ANL has about half a PFLOPS now, and Stevens says they are looking to this new system as a stepping stone into the exascale regime. "At that size we are within a factor of 50 or 100 of a PFLOPS, and the systems start to look like what an exascale system will look like."

Mind the gap
Stevens is well aware of the challenges in software and architecture that stand between him and a useful PFLOPS, and he is involved in leading a variety of efforts to help bridge that gap. For example, ANL is building a consortium around their new machine to address the algorithmic and application challenges of scaling out applications into the petascale. This effort builds on the success ANL had with a similar consortium they built around their early Blue Gene in 2004. Stevens says the new consortium will address "how we get application developers and the broader academic community to have momentum addressing the software challenges in exascale," using the new IBM system as a testbed.

Exascale systems, which Stevens is hoping we'll attain by the end ...

 

Continue reading: http://insidehpc.com/2009/10/21/rick-stevens-future-supercomputing/