In 1960 I wasn’t even born.  By 1976 the US was celebrating its 200^th birthday. And by 1984 I took my first computer class; it’s best if we don’t discuss the outcome of that one. 

But during those same 3 milestones, the world saw computing break the kiloflop, then megaflop and finally the gigaflop barriers.  That is a pretty amazing run up in computing technology.

The next major milestone was the teraflop barrier, and that took an additional 15 years. Only nine years later, in 2008, we saw the petaflop barrier shattered  (don’t forget the role the AMD Opteron^™ processor played there!)

The pace of change continues in the world of supercomputing, and this year is no different. What we are starting to see now is the continued use of GPU technology to augment CPUs in these supercomputing solutions.

A few years back, when AMD purchased ATI, it was clear to us that the future is Fusion, the merging of CPU and GPU to develop an integrated computing fabric.  However, at the time, many could not see the wisdom of the strategy, but if you fast forward to today, CPUs and GPUs are finding themselves in the same processors (now called APUs) and on the server side, the continued acceleration of GPU computing.

Part of this compute model really demands a software environment to make it work, and OpenCL^TM and DirectCompute are two ways that we will see this compute environment come together. Look for plenty of news and excitement around heterogeneous computing environments this year as more companies add tools, software and utilities that help accelerate this transition.

As we continue to march towards the next barrier, the exaflop, it is clear to everyone that we will get there.  Possibly even sooner, rather than later.  We don’t necessarily know what the systems will look like, but it’s a high probability that CPUs and GPUs will both play a big part in the solution.

Progress continues on, and this year’s Supercomputing event in New Orleans is a showcase of what the future has to offer.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.