A new definition for high-performance computing

It seems as if power-efficient computers for mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing—take your pick of names for this type of computing—are in vogue. These upstarts appear to be stealing the spotlight from traditional, high-performance processors, like those traditionally discussed at the annual August symposium, Hot Chips. But don’t think that faster computers are not in demand. Take weather forecasting, for example. Increasing the precision of numerical weather forecasting will require a weather model with a mesh size 10-times finer than current models. So an existing three-dimensional model would require a 1,000-times more nodes than it has now. Faster computers are also always in demand in similar application fields, such as bioinformatics, material simulation, structural analysis, and fluid dynamics. However, this market’s total size is not large despite its varied application field. Consequently, supercomputing and highperformance computer manufacturers have found it difficult to survive in the marketplace. How can manufacturers of high-performance computers survive in the 21st century?