Supercomputers as powerful as 50million pcs here within eight years?

Intel, imec and five Flemish universities have officially opened the Flanders ExaScience Lab at the imec research facilities in Leuven, Belgium. According to Intel, the lab will develop software to run on its exascale computer systems, delivering 1000 times the performance of today's fastest supercomputers, using up to 1million cores and 1billion processes to do so. One of the challenges in the development of exascale computers is energy consumption. Wilfried Verachtert (pictured), imec's high performance computing project manager, said energy is one of the biggest challenges. "The Cray Jaguar – a petascale computer – uses 7MW. Exascale devices will consume 7000MW, which is clearly impossible. Even with next generation chips, this figure only comes down to 500MW. The target needs to be 50MW." Verachtert also pointed out the impact of hardware failures. "In the future, exascale computers may experience one hardware failure per second. Working with this will require massive parallelisation of software – maybe 10m parts." The Flanders ExaScience Lab brings together all Flemish universities along with imec and a world-leading semiconductor company in a unique research collaboration. The Flanders ExaScience Lab will be hosted at imec and is supported by the Flemish Government agency for innovation by science and technology (IWT). "We are excited about this unique collaboration with Intel and five Flemish universities here at imec, added Luc Van den hove, president and ceo of imec. "By sharing our expertise, I'm convinced that the Flanders ExaScience Lab will bring valuable software solutions for Intel's future exascale computers. I would like to express my thanks to the Flemish government, Flanders Investment and Trade and the IWT for supporting this lab, and I'm looking forward to this long-term strategic partnership."