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Superconducting Technology Assessment - nitrd

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Only one significant effort to architect a balanced supercomputer architecture that could effectively incorporate<br />

RSFQ has been carried out to date. In the initial HTMT study, Sterling, Gao, Likharev, and Messina recognized that<br />

RSFQ provided the blinding processing speed desired for compute-intensive operation, while CMOS was needed<br />

to provide the high-density, low-cost components needed for data-intensive operation and access to conventional<br />

I/O and storage devices. This led to a three-tier processing architecture with two communications layers:<br />

High - speed network for RSFQ interprocessor communications<br />

RSFQ<br />

node<br />

RSFQ<br />

node<br />

RSFQ<br />

node<br />

RSFQ<br />

node<br />

4º K<br />

Staging<br />

electronics<br />

Staging<br />

electronics<br />

Staging<br />

electronics<br />

Staging<br />

electronics<br />

Interprocessor network for data intensive operations<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

CMOS<br />

node<br />

25º C<br />

Not shown are the attached storage and I/O devices. These would be connected to CMOS nodes or to the<br />

data-intensive network and would achieve high aggregate bandwidth as a result of parallel access. A closer look<br />

at memory technologies led to inclusion of a layer of “bulk” memory—high-density, block-access memory such as<br />

might be provided by holographic storage or disk. Even with the high feature densities achieved by CMOS,<br />

a petabyte of memory takes up significant space.<br />

(Note that partitioning the architecture into distinct compute-intensive and data-intensive segments correlates with the<br />

two operating temperature regimes. We found this useful in defining technology boundaries for this study.)<br />

The HTMT project identified and pursued several technologies that might efficiently implement a design based on<br />

the above conceptual architecture. At its conclusion, the HTMT architecture had taken the form concurrently.<br />

In practice, there are limits to the degree of concurrency supportable by a given application at any one time. Low<br />

latency is desirable, but latency is limited by speed-of-light considerations, so the larger the system, the higher the<br />

latency between randomly selected nodes. As a result, applications must be capable of high degrees of parallelism<br />

to take advantage of physically large systems.<br />

162

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