Mar 2010
Innovations in HPC

The shape of developments in high-performance computing has changed significantly over the years. Early HPC systems featured proprietary architectures, exotic technology and astronomical prices – while today’s supercomputers are basically clusters of PCs. Many applications that were run on early HPC systems were effectively serialized to fit the early powerful, monolithic processors found in supercomputers. As multiprocessor supercomputers were developed, these serial applications were modified, and new programming tools were developed, to expose a limited amount of parallelism.

When the floating-point performance of commodity processors increased significantly and the industry fully appreciated the role that parallelism was to play in HPC, applications were no longer tweaked to expose a limited parallelism, but were rewritten with massive scalability in mind – and a new era of HPC began. The most significant change to the HPC market through the past decade was not the end of proprietary architectures, or advances in parallel processing, but was instead the affordable price point that commodity-based systems delivered. As we enter a new decade, a number of technologies are poised to have a major impact on HPC systems and applications. Multicore processors, treated by many as a simple extension to multiprocessor systems, will transform system design and programming practices.

This report examines the major innovations in HPC, including developments in the areas of processors, accelerators, systems, memory, storage, networking, applications, development tools and middleware.

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