Revisiting the 2008 Exascale Computing Study at SC18

1 December 2018 by Mehmet Belviranli

A report published a decade ago conveyed the results of a study aimed at determining if it were possible to achieve 1000X the computational power of the then-emerging petascale systems at a system power of no more than 20 MW. On November 14 at the SC18 supercomputing conference in Dallas, some of the original contributors to the report participated in a Birds of a Feather session in which they reflected on the document, sharing what they deemed to be its hits and misses and making predictions for 2028.

Session leader, Jeffrey Vetter of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said the 2008 report, titled “Exascale Computing Study: Technology Challenges in Achieving Exascale Systems,” has been cited more than 1,000 times and that many people look to it to understand what research agendas they should undertake and to consider what are the most salient challenges to be faced in high-performance computing.