Many in the HPC research community are starting to work on “exascale” these days — the ability to do 10^18 floating point operations per second. Exascale is such a difficult problem that it will require new technologies in many different areas before it can become a reality. Case in point is this entry at Inside HPC today entitled, “InfiniBand Charts Course to Exascale“.
It cites The Exascale Report and a blog entry by Lloyd Dickman at the IBTA about their course going forward. It’s a good read — Lloyd’s a smart, thoughtful guy.
That being said, there’s a key piece missing from the discussion: the (networking) software. More specifically: the current OpenFabrics Verbs API abstractions are (probably) unsuitable for exascale, a fact that Fab Tillier (Microsoft) and I presented at the OpenFabrics workshop in Sonoma last year (1up, 2up).