The Rise of the Commodity Vectors

Commodity clusters revolutionized high performance computing in a fundamental way since its first inception, and now now dominate many of the world’s premiere supercomputers on the Top500, growing to the scale of over 10,000 CPU cores and beyond. Still,"classical" specialized vector supercomputers still remain to be sold and facilitated, especially at high end of the market, largely due to the nature of some of the HPC workloads still requiring the computing power of vectors, in areas such as CFD, FEM with kernels such as FFT, characterized as mostly large-scale irregular sparse codes Finally, however, commoditization of vector computing is on the rise, lead by multimedia application requirements, and spurred many architectures to arise such as GPUs and the Cell processor. But various problems still remain by which we cannot claim with 100% confidence that commodity vectors are here to stay in the HPC space. Research and development has to be conducted at various degrees of intensity to utilize the new breed of commodity vector hardware to their fullest capabilities, just as various research were needed to harness the power and the scalability of commodity clusters. In the talk I will outline some of the details, and our recent research endeavors aimed at solving the various issues.