Technologies for High-Performance Computing in the Next Millennium

Abstract

The environment for high-performance computing is changing rapidly. On the hardware side, chip-related advances such as copper metallization, siliconon-insulator, and high-resolution lithography will continue to contribute to rapid increases in device speed. Although the investments needed continue to grow, we don’t see any fundamental roadblocks during the next ten years. With higher levels of integration, the importance of packaging grows, and IBM has paid quite a bit of attention to this. On the software side, the changes brought about by an increased interest in Open Source promises to fundamentally lower the capital requirements for the introduction of new platforms and to affect the computer industry in many other ways as well.

The evolution of the IBM RS/6000 SP System continues¡ªafter it proved its ability to play chess successfully against the reigning World Champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. IBM is on track to deliver in 2000 the ASCI White 10-Tflop/s system to the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Equally interesting is the fact that the whole area that IBM calls Deep Computing is growing dramatically. Commercial use of HPC Technologies is reaching new highs as exemplified by the high placement on the recent Top500 list of an IBM RS/6000 SP System at Charles Schwab, a financial services company offering stock trading on the Web.

IBM follows up on these successes by continued investments. Most recently announced is the Blue Gene project, which aims to have a Petaflop/s system ready by 2004 to tackle the protein-folding problem. This challenging problem is of great importance to better understand, among other things, how proteins actually interact with the living organism.

Deep Computing promises to affect our lives in fundamental and interesting ways. More information cm these activities is available on the IBM Web pages, at <http://www.research.ibm.com/dci/>.