The HPC Software Conundrum

In the computer world there are concepts that appear to be universal. The adage, “software moves hardware” is one example. Talk to anyone about the history of computers in this context and they will nod their head in agreement. Many of the same people, however, will also get whipped into a frenzy when new hardware is announced. Such enthusiasm is perfectly understandable when processor clocks were increasing each year. This is what I call the Free Lunch era of computing. Lunchtime is over. Events in the processor market and particularly the HPC market have changed the game. Software applications that once enjoyed performance increases from increased clock speed have not seen any real significant bumps in recent years. Celebrating and ranking processors based on clock speed is therefore of little value. Indeed, the current hardware advances in both multi-core and streaming-core (GP-GPU) do not…

1. Smashing (and) the HPL Benchmark
2. Small Hardware and Big Software at SC10
3. High Performance Community
4. Round Two of the OpenMP-MPI Smack-Down
5. Smart Clusters: Intelligence Is As Intelligence Does