The Shape of Things to Come: Future Potential of "Heavy Node" Multi-Core HPC Architectures

The Top 500 list has been tracking supercomputers since the early 1990s. The bulk of those systems, especially recently, have been built from leading edge commodity microprocessors. This paper analyzes potential future characteristics of such systems in the light of the advent of power-constrained multi-core microprocessors. The resulting predictions indicate that such systems will not be able, by themselves, to keep up traditional trend lines.