You (Still) Can't Always Get What You Want

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Written by Douglas Eadline

Published: 25 February 2016

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You can't always get what you want. But that doesn't stop me from asking. Besides, Buddha's got my back. Here's my HPC wish list.

[Note: A recent article by Al Geist, How To Kill A Supercomputer: Dirty Power, Cosmic Rays, and Bad Solder reminds us that statistics at scale represents a big challenge for HPC. The following updated article was originally published in Linux Magazine in May 2006 and offers some further thoughts on this important issue. ]

Twenty five years ago I wrote a short article in a now defunct parallel computing magazine (Parallelogram) entitled "How Will You Program 1000 Processors?" Back then, it was a good question that had no easy answer. Today, it's still a good question with no easy answer, except now it seems a bit more urgent as we step into the "multi-core" era. Indeed, when I originally wrote the article, using 1,000 processors was a far off, but real possibility. Today, 1,000 processors are a reality for many practitioners of high-performance computing (HPC). And as dual-cores (and now 18-core processors) hit the server room, effectively doubling processor counts, many more people will be joining the 1,000P club very soon.

So let's get adventurous and ask, "How will you program 10,000 processors?" As I realized twenty five years ago, such a question may never really have a complete answer. In the history of computers, no one has ever answered such a question to my liking — even when considering ten processors. Of course, there are plenty of methods and ideas like threads, messages, barrier synchronization, and so on, but when I have to think more about the computer than about my problem, something is wrong.