Plenary talk II Advances in high-performance computing

High-performance computing, or supercomputing, is the field of exploiting massive parallelism through advanced hardware technology and architectures to solve large application problems. There have been many important turning points at which the field has made significant shifts and changes. Among these are the golden years of vector supercomputers, the rapid developments of the massively parallel architectures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the cluster computing era starting from the mid 1990s, the Grid Computing, from the late 1990s, the development of the Earth Simulator in Japan, the U.S. regaining of the leadership of Supercomputing with the introduction the IBM Blue Gene L, then finally the emergence of the first PetaFLOPS machine, the roadrunner, in mid 2008. This talk will consider the progress in this field from an architectural, performance and historical points of view. It will then introduce some of the implications and challenges associated with the latest developments and the needed research directions. It will then introduce some of the ongoing efforts that are likely to produce the next generation of Parallel Supercomputers, such as the DARPA High-Productivity Computing Systems initiative.