Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: petascale
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Cyberinfrastructure: Lots of Room at the Edge
Our fascination with large instruments and massive computing often blinds us to discovery via many instruments at smaller scales.
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Exascale Software: Just a Few Orders of Magnitude
Extraordinary parallelism, unprecedented data locality and adaptive resilience: these are daunting architecture, system software and application challenges for exascale computing.
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Why We Compute
Why do we, as researchers and practitioners, have this deep and abiding love of computing? Why do we compute? I suspect it is a deeper, more primal yearning, one that underlies all of science and engineering and that unites us in a common cause. It is the insatiable desire to know and understand. From terascale…
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The Zeros Matter: Bigger Is Different
Not that long ago, a megabyte was a lot of storage, whether primary or secondary. Not long ago supercomputers were defined by the number of megaflops they achieved. Times change. Bigger is not just bigger, bigger is different. Quantitative change begets qualitative change.
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Simple HPC Wins – Usually
You want to be the first person to design a successful, transistorized computer system, not the last person to design vacuum tube computer. As I frequently told my graduate students at Illinois, the great thing about parallel computing is the question never changes – “How can I increase performance?” – but the answers do. Babbage…
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Serial Dismay, Parallel Excitement
Cloud services now operate on the largest computing systems we have ever built on this planet, with service reliability expectations far higher than what we demand from scientific applications. Thus, I also believe there are lessons from cloud computing that are potentially applicable to computational science applications.