Exascale computing - An impossible challenge?

For the past two decades supercomputing has hitched a lift on the microprocessor revolution with year-on-year performance increases driven by microprocessor improvements. The transition from terascale to petascale computing has largely involved incremental improvements to software and hardware but has involved a higher degree of parallelism than ever before. Computing at the exascale, where application will consist of tens of millions of threads, will require disruptive changes to hardware and software. This talk will explore some of the challenges and discuss if an exaflop/s is really achievable this decade.