Enabling Technologies for Petaflops Computing

by Thomas Sterling, Paul C. Messina, Paul H. Smith

Building a computer ten times more powerful than all the networked computing capability in the United States is the subject of this book by leading figures in the high performance computing community. It summarizes the near-term initiatives, including the technical and policy agendas for what could be a twenty-year effort to build a petaFLOP scale computer. (A FLOP -- Floating Point OPeration -- is a standard measure of computer performance and a PetaFLOP computer would perform a million billion of these operations per second.) Chapters focus on four interrelated areas: applications and algorithms, device technology, architecture and systems, and software technology.

ebook

First published July 26, 1995

About the author

Dr. Thomas Sterling is a Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University, a Faculty Associate at California Institute of Technology, a CSRI Fellow for Sandia National Laboraties, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D as a Hertz Fellow from MIT in 1984. He is probably best known as the father of Beowulf clusters and for his research on Petaflops computing architecture. His current research is focused on the ParalleX execution model and its practical implementation in computer architecture and programming methods. Professor Sterling is the co-author of six books and holds six patents. He was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize with collaborators in 1997.