Moving workloads to a better place

Abstract

The performance of supercomputers is not growing anymore at the rate it once used to. Several years ago a break with historical trends appeared. First the break appeared at the lower end of worldwide supercomputer installations, but now it affects a significant number of systems with average performance. Power consumption is becoming the most significant problem in computer system design. The traditional power reduction trends do not apply any more for the current semiconductor technology, and the performance of general-purpose devices is limited by their power consumption. Server and system design is in turn limited by their allowable power consumption, which is bounded for reasons of cost and practical cooling methods. To further increase performance,
the use of specialized devices, in specialized server designs, optimized for a certain class of workloads, is gaining momentum. Data movement has been demonstrated to be a significant drain of energy, and is furthermore a performance bottleneck when data is moved over an interconnect with limited bandwidth. With data becoming an increasingly important asset for governments, companies, and individuals, the development of systems optimized on a device and server level for data-intensive workloads, is
necessary. In this work, we explore some of the fundamentals required for such a system, as well as key use-cases...