Future Trends of HPC in a Disruptive Scenario

Book excerpt: The realization that the use of components off the shelf (COTS) could reduce costs sparked the evolution of the massive parallel computing systems available today. The main problem with such systems is the development of suitable operating systems, algorithms and application software that can utilise the potential processing power of large numbers of processors. As a result, systems comprising millions of processors are still limited in the applications they can efficiently solve. Two alternative paradigms that may offer a solution to this problem are Quantum Computers (QC) and Brain Inspired Computers (BIC). This book presents papers from the 14th edition of the biennial international conference on High Performance Computing - From Clouds and Big Data to Exascale and Beyond, held in Cetraro, Italy, from 2 - 6 July 2018. It is divided into 4 sections covering data science, quantum computing, high-performance computing, and applications. The papers presented during the workshop covered a wide spectrum of topics on new developments in the rapidly evolving supercomputing field – including QC and BIC – and a selection of contributions presented at the workshop are included in this volume. In addition, two papers presented at a workshop on Brain Inspired Computing in 2017 and an overview of work related to data science executed by a number of universities in the USA, parts of which were presented at the 2018 and previous workshops, are also included. The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves high-performance computing.