Development Trends of Modern Supercomputers

Abstract

This work includes analysis of the computation nodes of modern supercomputers from two perspectives; first the hardware components focus and secondly discuss the infrastructure. Identified trends leads to basic options of computation node design. The paper classifies the modern architectures of universal processing cores and specialized hardware accelerators cores; studies the recent trends in memory hierarchy design and intra-node interconnect; the paper includes ways of using the non-volatile memory in modern memory hierarchy. Furthermore, the paper analyses the recent trends in HPC infrastructure, in particular in modern liquid cooling approaches and monitoring. The basic variants of HPC computing nodes design are based on energy efficient universal processor and set of energy-efficient specialized hardware accelerators cores, according to the observed trends. The paper focuses on recent technologies that are currently at various stages of production or at the functional prototype stage. The study also discusses state-of-the-art computational challenges and algorithms-to-architecture mapping issues. Lastly, the paper discusses the current technological problems and main areas to maintain the progress in HPC area.