The biggest challenge computer architects are facing in the pushtowards exascale computing is the problem of power consumption. Thephysical scaling laws that have delivered ever higher performance atconstant power consumption have reached their limits, so furtherimprovements in the efficiency of devices must rely on innovation inthe processor architecture.

The graphics processing unit (GPU) hasmuch to offer to exascale computing since it combines high
floating-point arithmetic capability with a power efficient design.The past five years have seen explosive growth in the adoption of GPUsuntil a Cray supercomputer with NVIDIA GPUs occupied the #1 spot on the Top500 list in November 2012. NVIDIA will continue to innovate inthe area of GPU architecture to develop ever more capable and efficient devices.

Speaker: Timothy Lanfear

Timothy Lanfear manages the European solution architecture group in NVIDIA’s Professional Solutions Group. He has twenty years’ experience in HPC, starting as a computational scientist in British Aerospace’s corporate research centre, and then moving to technical pre-sales roles with Hitachi, ClearSpeed, and most recently NVIDIA. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD for research in the field of graph theory, both from Imperial College London.