Parametric Estimation of the Ultimate Size of Hypercomputers

The performance of the emerging petaflops-scale supercomputers of the nearest future (hypercomputers) will be governed not only by the clock frequency of the processing nodes or by the width of the system bus, but also by such factors as the overall power consumption and the geometric size. In this paper, we study the influence of such parameters on one of the most important characteristics of a general purpose computer - on the degree of multithreading that must be present in an application to make the use of the hypercomputer justifiable. Our major finding is that for the class of applications with purely random memory access patterns "super-fast computing" and "high-performance computing" are essentially synonyms for "massively-parallel computing."Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, published in Proc. 6th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 200