back to article Obama endorses 3D TLC flash. How else can you do exaflop computing?

New storage technologies are needed for exabyte-munching exaflop supercomputers. The same-old-same-old disk tech used for supercomputers won’t do for the exaflop generation promised by President Obama’s US leadership supercomputing order. This is Obama’s moonshot, the equivalent of President Kennedy’s man on the moon vision …

  1. elDog

    Seems obvious that we need some type of SETI model

    Would you all mind lending your Apples, PCs, and phones to the US government - they have some real work to do? If you don't mind, it might involve targeting missiles and other fun things.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Seems obvious that we need some type of SETI model

      One of the fun things might be to process all that data the NSA has collected... and once they cut back, process all the data they get from what the 5-eyes will collect and give to them. There has to be a serious amount of data there.... possibly even more than "aerodynamic testing".

  2. Jim O'Reilly

    Roll out the new crosspoint memory?

    Micron's new crosspoint memory may have a place in the sun here, at 1000x faster than flash. Package it in Hybrid Memory cube modules close to the DRAM/CPU/GPU complex and that is a screamingly fast solution - timeframe to able to do that is about 3 years which is when real money starts getting spent on the new super.

    Note that HMC could be touching 1 TB/s bandwidth for DRAM in that timeframe, and that's per CPU/GPU module.

    NVMe may form the second tier memory, but it really isn't enough on its own. The data has to go to networked storage, so compression accelerators are needed to get the data rate down, assuming there is reasonable compressibility in the data. Then we'll need some rally fast networks to move data out.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Roll out the new crosspoint memory?

      So you don't think the govt hasnt already had this tech or similar for some while? Seriously. We received the internet years after DARPA was finished with it.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: Roll out the new crosspoint memory?

        gb2 you cave, Mulder

  3. Eddy Ito
    Facepalm

    Easy

    Dear Prez. Obama,

    I hear the Chinese are doing great things in supercomputing and are even developing their own chips. Perhaps we could ask them if they could sell us a few of those.

    mkay thx bye,

    Eddy

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Easy

      Luminous when?

  4. Ian Michael Gumby
    Boffin

    Meh.

    You do realize he has no clue about anything he's said right?

    Crossbar / Intel/Micron, all have promising tech, but the Motherboards and information/communication/power bus has to be redesigned as well as networking protocol needs a face lift....

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Meh.

      1) Do you really think Obama writes a up a shopping list? He is handed a letter to sign by some gremium of sages.

      2) He doesn't even mention 3D TLC flash: announcement

      3) That the stuff around the tech has to be designed appropriately should be obvious to the meanest intelligence

      In the end this is just another "industrial policy" effort like the 80's "Strategic Computing Initiative" (this one is even called "National Strategic Computing Initiative" again) which started as response to Japan's Fifth-Generation Computer project but veered off into supercomputing and weapons technology within 2 years. More here: Strategic Computing Initiative and Book Reference. It is very unclear whether this is going to help one way or the other or from where the money is going to come from given the parlous, if not cancerous, state of finances with the next recession looming. There will be bailouts to push...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yeah, they're just looking for a way to lose the capex on the now illegal Utah DC, any pie in the sky scheme will do.

    Gonna go score one myself too :/

  6. Charles Manning

    But will it rouse the populace?

    The reason the moonshot had a lasting spinoff was that it engaged thousands of kids who got hooked on a fantastic dream about the capabilities of technology.

    The late 1960s saw model lunar modules hanging from the ceiling in every second kid's bedroom. Tens of thousands of kids walked around on Halloween dressed up in tin foil space suits.

    What are the exabyte generation going to hang from their ceilings and do for Halloween costumes?

    Until you can engage a population like that, you won't get a long term benefits.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: But will it rouse the populace?

      What are the exabyte generation going to hang from their ceilings

      Cat6a

      and do for Halloween costumes?

      The skinny ones are 1s the fat ones are 0s.

  7. Nate Amsden

    probably mostly spinning disk

    with some ssd up front as a tier. Since I think most HPC stuff is still throughput based, last I heard SSDs don't give much competitive edge on sequential reads than disk.

    1. Jim O'Reilly

      Re: probably mostly spinning disk

      4x the sequential perfomance isn't much?

  8. VeganVegan

    Buzzardmeat

    There is a million-dollar prize for figuring out parts of the Navier-Stokes equations. Maybe they care to contribute some to the prize?

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Buzzardmeat

      How is that going to help?

      Plus it is not about "figuring out part of". It's about the existence of smooth solutions. This has nothing to do with computation or even practical applicability. And you will have to await a mathematical mind, prize money or not. Maybe Terry Tao will have a lucky break in solving a it?

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