The roadmap to build and deploy an exascale computer has extended over the last few years–and more than once.
Initially, the timeline marked 2018 as the year an exaflop-capable system would be on the floor, just one year after the CORAL pre-exascale machines are installed at three national labs in the U.S.. That was later shifted to 2020, and now, according to a new report setting forth the initial hardware requirements for such a system, it is anywhere between 2023-2025. For those who follow high performance computing and the efforts toward exascale computing, this extended timeline might not come as a surprise given key challenges ahead. While the petaflop supercomputers that top the bi-annual list of the world’s fastest systems are yielding tremendous scientific successes now, there are a number of areas in both research and industry that can harness exascale-class computing resources, including cloud-resolving earth system models, multi-scale materials models, and beyond.
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