ABSTRACT

Supercomputing – or High Performance Computing (HPC) – has become to be dominated by standard components. A quick look at the Top500 list shows that clusters built from such standard components have become the architecture of choice. The fraction of clusters in the list has increased from about 2% in 2000 to about 73% in 2006. The key driving factor is the availability of competitive processor technology in the mass market on the one hand and a growing awareness of this potential in the user community on the other hand. These trends have motivated small companies to seek business opportunities in building large systems from standard components. Such commodity based systems rely mainly on massive parallelism in order to compete with traditional approaches. At the same time other approaches have been brought into the supercomputing arena which promise to allow for another leap in peak performance. This paper sets out to describe the current situation in supercomputing from a point of view of architectures and to describe futures scenarios and challenges that arise from the current trends in hardware and software development.