InformationWeek

Software now presents the greatest challenge in supercomputing due to the need for code that matches processing capability. The top spot in the most recent ranking of supercomputers in November went to China's National University of Defense Technology's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which reached a benchmark speed of 33.86 petaflops/second. The next goal is exascale computing with speeds of a million trillion calculations per second, which Argonne National Laboratory's Mike Papka says is possible by 2020. One hurdle to building faster supercomputers is creating an operating system that can manage that many calculations per second. Argonne and two other national laboratories are addressing this challenge with the Argo project. High-performance computing also increasingly is focused on applicability to other technology developments such as big data and analytics, open systems as opposed to proprietary systems, and energy efficiency as a requirement, says Brocade's Tony Celeste.

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