From PCs to Petaflops - The Future of Really Big Computers-Caltech, Nov 5, 2003

Semiconductor technology has had an unprecedented increase in computational power. Performance by the fastest machines in the world has almost doubled every year for the last 10 years. The computer architectures that incorporate the technology and release its potential have gone through dramatic changes. New architectures could employ at least 100 times as many processors as we use today. Among these are logic-intensive architectures with processors incorporating large structures of functional units and processor-in-memory architectures that embed processing logic directly on the memory chips. Dr. Sterling will explore the range of alternative supercomputer architectures from PC based Beowulf-class cluster systems to a new generation of logic intensive and PIM architectures that hold the promise of future breakthroughs in computational science and supercomputing.