Exascale Challenges and Opportunities: HPC User Forum, September 2011, San Diego, California

This IDC update summarizes presentations on the topic "challenges facing exascale supercomputing," which includes the development of sometimes radically new computer systems that aim to overcome energy efficiency and programmability challenges. The presentations took place at the 42nd High-Performance Computing (HPC) User Forum meeting at the Omni San Diego Hotel in San Diego, California, September 6-8, 2011. The principal theme of the meeting was "Using HPC to Drive Economic and Scientific Competitiveness." Other tasks and topics of the meeting included:

• Share information among HPC users, vendors, and IDC for improving the health of the HPC industry
• Further explore HPC data-intensive computing ("Big Data")
• Review plans for petascale and exascale HPC systems
• Further explore application scalability and high-productivity computing
• Evaluate the use of alternative processors, heterogeneous multicores, and GPGPUs in HPC
• Assess HPC cloud computing technical and business models
• Provide updates on HPC industry outreach programs
• Provide updates on key HPC programs in the government sector
• Present technical updates from HPC hardware, software, and storage vendors
• Offer IDC's latest HPC market update and forecast data