The CEO of chip giant AMD says the high-performance computing (HPC) industry must start becoming more efficient, or it will have to turn to nuclear energy.
AMD CPU and GPU performance typically doubles every 2.4 years which is good progress either way, but power efficiency hasn’t seen as many improvements.
Speaking at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Dr Lisa Su noted that with zettaflop HPCs on the horizon, we need to focus our attention on performance per unit of energy to make zettaflop computation a reality.
Nuclear
According to current trends and assuming that progress does not slow down, AMD reckons that zettaflop computation will be here in about a decade (although Intel reckons it could be here in about half period).
The truth is that when they arrive is not as important as when they can be used in a usable, powerful measure of energy.
Currently, Su generously estimates that an HPC capable of performance measured in zettaflops will use 500MW of electricity, or the equivalent of several thousand homes. To provide such power, consistently and reliably, a nuclear reactor is likely to be needed.
While there have been noticeable improvements in efficiency over the past few decades, progress has begun to slow as the room for further improvements shrinks.
“This flattening of efficiency has become the biggest challenge that we have to solve, from a technology standpoint as well as from a sustainability standpoint,” Su said.
He explained that compute efficiency must be the number one priority to solve the problem. While our methods are slow, Su explains that there may be other solutions including the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in high-performance computing.
Although there is a nominal sacrifice in accuracy, working on improving it may be the way forward. Whatever combination of methods AMD and other companies use to deliver performance improvements, it’s clear that the journey between the first zettaflop-capable HPC and real-world use is likely to be a long one. .
By means of The Register (Opens in a new tab)