Petaflops beater: Nvidia chief talks exascale
22.05.12
"We believe the right approach is to use much more energy-efficient processors. Using much simpler processors and many of them, we can optimise for throughput. The unfortunate part is that this processor would no longer be good for single-threaded applications. By adding the two processors, the sequential code can run on the CPU, the parallel code can run on the GPU, and as a result you can get the benefit of the both. We call it heterogeneous computing."
He would say that. NVIDIA makes GPUs after all. But the message is being heard in the supercomputing world, where 39 of the top 500 use GPUs, up from 17 a year ago , and including the number 2 supercomputer: Tianhe-1A in China. Thirty-five of those 39 GPUs are from NVIDIA.
At a mere 2.57 petaflops though, Tianhe-1A is well behind the K computer, which does not use GPUs. Does that undermine Huang's thesis? "If you were to design the K computer with heterogeneous architecture, it would be even more," he insists. "At the time the K computer was conceived, almost 10 years ago, heterogeneous was not very popular."
Source: Register