Exascale system graphic

University of Maryland
Exascale Systems Research

Bruce Jacob - email address - http://www.ece.umd.edu/~blj/

Overview of the Work

Current ultra-high-performance computers execute instructions at the rate of roughly 10 PFLOPS (10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) and dissipate power in the range of 10 MW. The next generation will need to execute instructions at EFLOPS rates -- 100x as fast as today's -- but without dissipating any more power. To achieve this challenging goal, the emphasis is on power-efficient execution. Energy and power costs are the primary reasons that our system-wide execution throughput (OPS) is no better than it currently is -- while one could staple together 100 supercomputers to create an exascale system, not many could afford to pay the resulting electric bill. And yet, a significant amount of research is still focused on increasing processor performance, rather than decreasing power and energy-to-solution. Modern high-performance systems are not throughput-bound; they are power-bound. Processing is so cheap it is effectively free; shaving power and energy costs at every opportunity, and at every level of the system, is the trick. Similarly, memory and communication are the primary reasons that our time-to-solution is no better than it currently is -- the memory system is slow; the communication overhead is high; and yet a significant amount of research is still focused on increasing processor performance, rather than decreasing (the cost of) data movement. Modern high-performance systems are not compute-bound; they are data-bound. ALUs are so cheap that some propose to put them out in the memory -- processing is free; getting the right data to the right place, cheaply, is the trick. This page describes our work in high-performance systems, including flash-based main memories and Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube DRAM, as well as our current multiprocessor system-design work.

Computational Artifacts

The Studies

Brought to you by Northrop Grumman, Intel, Micron, Sandia National Labs, US Dept. of Energy, and No Such Agency


Important News

Recent Invited Talks

2015 DOE
  • Recent Work in Exascale Systems Design. Dept. of Energy, ASCR. Spring 2015.
ACS
  • Recent Work in High-Performance Systems Design. Advanced Computing Systems. Winter 2015.
2014 SAMOS Keynote
  • Next-Generation Memory Systems. Keynote, International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation (SAMOS), Samos Island, Greece. Summer 2014.
Computing Frontiers Keynote
  • High-Bandwidth, High-Capacity, Low-Power Memory Systems. Keynote, ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, Cagliari, Italy. Spring 2014.
2013 FORTH
  • (Exascale) Data Movement. Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH), Heraklion (Crete), Greece. Winter 2013.
University of Cyprus
  • (Exascale) Data Movement. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus. Winter 2013.

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