Exascale computing
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)";
Exascale computing is a significant achievement in computer engineering: primarily, it allows improved scientific applications and better prediction accuracy in domains such as weather forecasting, climate modeling and personalised medicine.
In 2022, the world's first public exascale computer, Frontier, was announced.
Definitions
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) are one measure of computer performance. FLOPS can be recorded in different measures of precision, however the standard measure (used by the TOP500 supercomputer list) uses 64 bit (double-precision floating-point format) operations per second using the High Performance LINPACK (HPLinpack) benchmark.
Whilst a distributed computing system had broken the 1 exaFLOPS barrier before Frontier, the metric typically refers to single computing systems. Supercomputers had also previously broken the 1 exaFLOPS barrier using alternative precision measures; again these do not meet the criteria for exascale computing using the standard metric.
Technological challenges
It has been recognized that enabling applications to fully exploit capabilities of exascale computing systems is not straightforward.
History
The first petascale (1015 FLOPS) computer entered operation in 2008.
Although exascale computing was not achieved by 2018, in the same year the Summit OLCF-4 supercomputer performed 1.8×1018 calculations per second using an alternative metric whilst analysing genomic information.
The exaFLOPS barrier was first broken in March 2020 by the distributed computing network Folding@home coronavirus research project.
In June 2020
In 2022, the world's first public exascale computer, Frontier, was announced.
Development
United States
In 2008, two United States of America governmental organisations within the US Department of Energy, the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, provided funding to the Institute for Advanced Architectures for the development of an exascale supercomputer; Sandia National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory were also to collaborate on exascale designs.
In January 2012, Intel purchased the InfiniBand product line from QLogic for US$125 million in order to fulfill its promise of developing exascale technology by 2018.
By 2012, the United States had allotted $126 million for exascale computing development.
In February 2013,
On 29 July 2015, Barack Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing.
On 18 March 2019, the United States Department of Energy and Intel announced the first exaFLOPS supercomputer would be operational at Argonne National Laboratory by late 2022. The computer, named Aurora is to be delivered to Argonne by Intel and Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise), and is expected to use Intel Xe GPGPUs alongside a future Xeon Scalable CPU, and cost US$600 Million.
On 7 May 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Cray (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise) to build the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Frontier is anticipated to be fully operational in 2022
On 4 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD to build the El Capitan supercomputer at a cost of US$600 million, to be installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It is expected to be used primarily (but not exclusively) for nuclear weapons modeling. El Capitan was first announced in August 2019, when the DOE and LLNL revealed the purchase of a Shasta supercomputer from Cray. El Capitan will be operational in early 2023 and have a performance of 2 exaFLOPS. It will use AMD CPUs and GPUs, with 4 Radeon Instinct GPUs per EPYC Zen 4 CPU, to speed up artificial intelligence tasks. El Capitan should consume around 40 MW of electric power.
As of November 2021, the United States has three of the five fastest supercomputers in the world.
Japan
In Japan, in 2013, the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science began planning an exascale system for 2020, intended to consume less than 30 megawatts.
China
As of June 2022, China had two of the Top Ten fastest supercomputers in the world. According to the national plan for the next generation of high performance computers and the head of the school of computing at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China was supposed to develop an exascale computer during the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016–2020) which would enter service in the latter half of 2020.
European Union & United Kingdom
In 2011, several projects aiming at developing technologies and software for exascale computing were started in the European Union. The CRESTA project (Collaborative Research into Exascale Systemware, Tools and Applications),
In 2015, the Scalable, Energy-Efficient, Resilient and Transparent Software Adaptation (SERT) project, a major research project between the University of Manchester and the STFC Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, was awarded c. £1million from the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The SERT project was due to start in March 2015. It will be funded by EPSRC under the Software for the Future II programme, and the project will partner with the Numerical Analysis Group (NAG), Cluster Vision and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
On 28 September 2018, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) was formally established by the EU. The EuroHPC JU aims to build an exascale supercomputer by 2022/2023. The EuroHPC JU will be jointly funded by its public members with a budget of around €1 billion. The EU's financial contribution is €486 million.
In March 2023 the government of the United Kingdom announced it would invest £900 million in the development of an exascale computer.
Taiwan
In June 2017, Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing initiated the effort towards designing and building the first Taiwanese exascale supercomputer by funding construction of a new intermediary supercomputer based on a full technology transfer from Fujitsu corporation of Japan, which is currently building the fastest and most powerful A.I. based supercomputer in Japan.