Dell Promises ExaScale By 2015

Dell has claimed it will make exascale computing available by 2015, as the firm enters the high performance computing (HPC) market.

Speaking at the firm’s Enterprise Forum in San Jose, Sam Greenblatt, chief architect of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group, said the firm will have exascale systems by 2015, ahead of rival vendors. However, he added that development will not be boosted by a doubling in processor performance, saying Moore’s Law is no longer valid and is actually presenting a barrier for vendors.

“It’s not doubling every two years any more, it has flattened out significantly,” he said. According to Greenblatt, the only way firms can achieve exascale computing is through clustering. “We have to design servers that can actually get us to exascale. The only way you can do it is to use a form of clustering, which is getting multiple parallel processes going,” he said.

Not only did Greenblatt warn that hardware will have to be packaged differently to reach exascale performance, he said that programmers will also need to change. “This is going to be an area that’s really great, but the problem is you never programmed for this area, you programmed to that old Von Neumann machine.”

According to Greenblatt, shifting of data will also be cut down, a move that he said will lead to network latency being less of a performance issue.”Things are going to change very dramatically, your data is going to get bigger, processing power is going to get bigger and network latency is going to start to diminish, because we can’t move all this [data] through the pipe,” he said.

Greenblatt’s reference to data being closer to the processor is a nod to the increasing volume of data that is being handled. While HPC networking firms such as Mellanox and Emulex are increasing bandwidths on their respective switch gear, bandwidth increases are being outpaced by the growth in the size of datasets used by firms deploying analytics workloads or academic research.

That Dell is projecting 2015 for the arrival of exascale clusters is at least a few years sooner than firms such as Intel, Cray and HP, all of which have put a “by 2020″ timeframe on the challenge. However what Greenblatt did not mention is the projected power efficiency of Dell’s 2015 exascale cluster, something that will be critical to its usability.

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