Still Unsolved High-Performance Computing Challenges for up to Pre-Petascale Homogeneous Supercomputers

TL;DR

This paper reviews the performance challenges of pre-petascale homogeneous supercomputers, focusing on highly parallelizable applications like benchmarks, quantum simulators, and molecular dynamics, highlighting limitations and future research needs.

Contribution

It analyzes the performance limitations of pre-petascale homogeneous supercomputers for key applications using Amdahl's law and identifies ongoing challenges for efficient utilization.

Findings

Supercomputers reach over 400 Pflop/s performance.

Parallelization limitations are significant at terascale levels.

Homogeneous hardware still faces fundamental challenges for high-performance computing.

Abstract

Pre-exascale High Performance Computers (HPC) can reach more than 400 Pflop/s real perfor-mance according the HPLinpack benchmarks. For nanoscience and quantum biology there are requirements for those program codes based on quantum physics algorithms which is difficult to ideally parallelize. Such parallel codes reach their limitations at terascale performance clus-ters. The standard Amdahl's law suggestions for code parallelization complicates focusing and planning for the next step the parallel code developments. In this report we focused on a three key applications domain which are highly parallelizable: HPC benchmarks, quantum compu-ting simulators and Car-Parinello molecular dynamics. According the results we summarize the Amdahl's Law & Parallel Speedup performance achievements with supercomputer with pre-petascale homogeneous HPC hardware. We conclude as an universal computer the pre-petascale supercomputing performance homogeneous hardware still has the basic challeng-es which must be addressed by the researchers or developer in order efficiently to use them.