According to this CNET report, NCSA Director Thom Dunning believes that the future of supercomputing can be summed up in three letters: GPU.
What we’re really seeing in the efforts in China as well as the ones we have in the U.S. is that GPUs are what the future will look like,” said Dunning in a phone interview Thursday. “What we’re seeing is the beginning of something that’s going to be happening all over the world.”
Dunning goes on to say that it’s not going to be easy to tap into the potential computational power of GPUs. “Programming these machines to do [GPU] calculations is still a very substantial effort. There will be some applications that will be rewritten to use GPUs [but] a lot of times it will be only part of an application that will use it so you won’t get nearly the power and computing advantage of running it all on the GPU,” he said.
As reported on insideHPC.com, Dunning will lead a panel discussion on Future Supercomputing Centers at SC10 in New Orleans on Nov. 19 from 8:30 to 10 a.m.