Supercomputer momentum slowed, Moore's law has come to an end?
Tianhe-second supercomputer, Moore's law-IT news Supercomputer momentum slowed, Moore's law has come to an end?

Every six months a supercomputer research institution computers that would have released the latest world top 500 list, before you know it, this list has evolved into a competition. Institute of national laboratories and universities, military, NASA, even temporary compete supercomputer in the cloud – we all want to see who can make the data processing capabilities of the most powerful machines in the world.

This year the first name on the list is China's "milky way, second" super computers, computing 338.6 million times per second, Tianhe second climb to the top 500 list is November 2013 things back a year ago, in June 2013, Tianhe second speed remains the world's fastest computers. If you look at this June's list, you'll find new entrants to the list of computers that only United States Government under a Cray Supercomputer, ranked 10th.

Picture shows the milky way, second

Jack Dongarra, a Professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee is responsible for supercomputer is a regular list, he said that supercomputer seems to have a tendency to slow, maybe something wrong with Moore.

Dongarra observed signs of stagnation will not only appear at the top of the list, the same phenomenon also appears at the bottom of the list. On past experience, list growth in computer processing speed is much greater than at the bottom of ranking higher on the computer. From the chart below, we can see that over the past few years, growth trends.

"We can see the 1th and the No. 500 operational gaps in between the computers is gradually expanding. "Dongarra said. In other words, although I still have amazing computational capabilities of supercomputers born, but the frequency is not as high as in the past, top tail of relatively small computers are also in the hunt at the same speed is not at the same speed to keep up with.

For more than 10 years, Moore could very well apply to the top in the field, year after year accurate forecasting supercomputers astounding shooting performance boost, however, to maintain this performance-enhancing speed, in the future will become increasingly difficult. Transistor has narrowed down to the atomic level, chip designers have to an already superb toppled him on a multicore chip design, redesign, upgrade every time, significantly more difficult.

A few years ago, as operations accelerate device applied to the mixing of graphic processing computers were all the rage, but relative to the frenzy of hype, the performance of such systems is not large. Unless the development of next-generation, more powerful computer, researchers just 1.1 point drain potential of existing technologies.

Most on the list are provided by Intel computer processors – however, in planning future generations of microprocessors in Intel may not slow manner.

"We hope that Moore for predicting the future a wide variety of computing continues to make a difference. "Intel spokesman Bill Calder said in an e-mail. United States Government funding has shrunk to supercomputers the size, this could also be updating the list one reason for stagnation.

Although we're used to the processor manufacturers faster and cheaper chips offensive year after year, but maybe soon we will feel slower to upgrade.

Figure for June 2014 on list of the top ten supercomputers, Tianhe, still ranked the first, second, in the list of the top ten most is the United States's supercomputers.