[jmpman]

Back in the 2010 timeframe, there were articles about how an Exascale Supercomputers might be impossible. Would be interesting if someone could go back and assess where those predictions were wrong and where they held, and how the architecture changed to get around those true scaling limits.

[porcoda]

Power efficiency mostly. The power requirements of an exascale machine with 2010-timeframe hardware would be crazy.

[peter303]

Oak Ridge still consumes 20 megawatts. However older technology was appearing to require a gigawatt.

[totallyblasted]

That really helps me appreciate the power efficiency gains! So much improvement in so short time...

[WanderPanda]

But unfortunately power efficiency of GPUs seems to be levelling off recently

[jmpman]

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg81195/pdf/CH...

This was a governmental report on the challenges of Exascale. Contributors included major universities and all the US supercomputing facilities. It wasn’t that they overlooked the possibility of Moore’s law continuing and associated power reduction.

[jmpman]

https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2021/10/18/exascale-computings-fou...

Just found the article which explains the gains. Mostly GPU. A billion processors doing a billion fips each.