Beyond the beyond and the extremes of computing

Abstract

Twenty five years ago supercomputing was dominated by vector processors and emergent SIMD array processors clocked at tens of Megahertz. Today responding to dramatic advances in semiconductor device fabrication technologies, the world of supercomputing is dominated by multi-core based MPP and commodity cluster systems clocked at Gigahertz. Twenty five years in the future, the technology landscape will again have experienced dramatic change with the flat-lining of Moore's Law, the realization of nanoscale devices, and the emergence of potentially alien technologies, architectures, and paradigms. If Moore's Law were to continue to progress as before, we would be deploying systems approaching 100 Exaflops with clock rates nearing a Terahertz. But by then, power constraints, quantum effects, or our inability to exploit trillion way program parallelism may have forced us in to entirely new realms of processing. This presentation will consider the range of alternative technologies, architectures, and methods that may drive the extremes of computing beyond the current incremental steps of the current era.