PC-era moxie lives anew at supercomputer show

Computerworld - RENO, Nev. -- There's a lot that goes into making a supercomputer: wires, silicon -- and testosterone. It's like the PC era, especially in the 1990s, when vendors couldn't wait to boast about the latest performance gain.

You can find that aggressive, eye-twinkling energy again at the supercomputing's annual show here, SC07. The booths are big, the crowds are big and the boasts are epic.

When vendors were asked at a forum here when they would deliver the long-awaited petascale systems, they offered bold predictions. Frank Baetke, global high-performance technology manager at Hewlett-Packard Co., said "in the next couple of years."

Leo Suarez, vice president of deep computing at IBM, was even more optimistic. "I think you'll see petaflop machines from IBM next year," he said. And not just one petaflop machine, "you will probably see several petaflop machines.

So there you have it, sports fans. Not one but several petascale systems, any one of which would be roughly twice the power of the world's most powerful system operating today.

Of course, IBM can boast, because today it sits on the top of the latest Top500 list of supercomputers, released Monday, with its BlueGene/L system, which is used by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. That system has about half a petaflop of power.

Vendors such as Silicon Graphics Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. say petascale systems are possible with the architectures they have built. It's more a question of customers paying for them, they say.

And in a few years, petascale will be old news, such is the pace of development of these systems.

Erich Strohmaier, one of the authors of the Top500 list and a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that today, the minimum performance requirement for a computer to make the Top500 list is at least 6 TFLOPS. But if growth rates continue at the current exponential pace, by 2015 the system on the bottom of the Top500 list will be at least a petaflop.

"Only eight years from now, you are going to have to have a petaflop system to be on the list," said Strohmaier.

Put another way, the system that's No. 1 on the Top500 list today might not be powerful enough to make the list at all in six to eight years. Consequently, users might spend millions on a system only to replace in a matter of a few years. Supercomputers "are typically used between three and five years," said Strohmaier.

But life could get interesting again for PC users who today are resigned to the fact that the only things they have to get excited about are gadgets like iPhones, not laptops.

It takes about eight to 10 years for a supercomputer performance to reach the desktop level. That means today's No. 1 system may be something, that in a decade, you will carry around your home and "play games with," said Strohmaier.

Read more about Data Center in Computerworld's Data Center Topic Center.