Looking toward Exascale Computing

Recently, Argonne National Laboratory installed a half petaflop Blue Gene/P system. It is the world´s fastest open science supercomputer. With 163,840 cores, the machine is beginning to provide insight on how we might build future platforms as we scale toward exascale computing. There are many challenges, including the dramatic shift to multicore, the cost of electric power, and the need for robust fault management. In this talk I will focus on the architecture and system software challenges we face as we continue to attack ever-larger computational problems.