Exascale Timeline Pushed to 2023: What’s Missing in Supercomputing?
The roadmap to build and deploy an exascale computer has extended over the last few years–and more than once.
Initially, the timeline marked 2018 as the year an exaflop-capable system would be on the floor, just one year after the CORAL pre-exascale machines are installed at three national labs in the U.S.. That was later shifted to 2020, and now, according to a new report setting forth the initial hardware requirements for such a system, it is anywhere between 2023-2025. For those who follow high performance computing and the efforts toward exascale computing, this extended timeline might not come as a surprise given key challenges ahead. While the petaflop supercomputers that top the bi-annual list of the world’s fastest systems are yielding tremendous scientific successes now, there are a number of areas in both research and industry that can harness exascale-class computing resources, including cloud-resolving earth system models, multi-scale materials models, and beyond.