Andreas Olofsson ·
Post Exascale, the Era of Mechanical Configurability
I have been going to Super Computing on and off for 10 years and it’s always a fun spectacle. This year I was invited to participate in a panel on “Beyond Exascale”. Man, I remember when there were DARPA programs dedicated to addressing the challenges in reaching exascale.
The topic of my panel presentation was “mechanical reconfigurability”. We have been going around and around the grand flexibility challenge for 30 years now, trading off performance vs flexibility (CPU vs FPGA vs CGRA vs ASIC vs GPU vs TPU vs ASP vs BLAH-BLAH). The design exploration space is getting boring, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. In my view, the only practical escape path is mechanical reconfigurability. Like just in time compilation, but for hardware.
My pitch of having robots running around warehouse scale data centers reconfiguring compute might have been the wildest idea at the whole conference?
Description:
With the recent deployment of the U.S. Department of Energy’s first exascale system, the timing couldn’t be better for us to delve into the world of exascale and explore the challenges and opportunities in the post-exascale era. During this “golden age of architectures,” we are now seeing a Cambrian explosion of new technologies, catalyzed by chiplets, heterogeneous integration, open hardware, AI, and substantial global investments in semiconductors. This new level of heterogeneity is rich with opportunity but fraught with serious challenges that often seem insurmountable. This panel will survey post-exascale technologies, scrutinize enabling catalysts, and discuss their implications for system design, software, and applications.