A Processor View of the 2018 HPC Market

This Quick Take looks at the growing availability of commercial cloud-based quantum computing (QC), supported through either direct access to true QC systems or QC simulators based on traditional digital hardware. In addition to QC hardware, most cloud-based QC providers are also rolling out their own software development environments to help existing and new QC software developers more effectively explore QC programming. The choice of options for potential QC users is growing, and each of the QC providers offers a distinct take on QC architecture and programming.

The Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently announced plans for the development of a 1.5 exaflops system called Frontier to be delivered in 2021. US HPC maker Cray and chip maker AMD are the two key US commercial partners in this effort. Despite numerous press articles centered on the 1.5 exaflops peak performance of Frontier, ORNL's original RFP released in April of 2018 clearly called out the diverse workload requirements that Frontier would have to successfully handle that span the traditional modeling and simulation sector, big data analysis, and AI applications, while demonstrating a 50X improvement in solving key DOE science problems that today run at the 20 petaflops level. To meet those ambitious goals, strong support from DOE's companion $1.7 billion Exascale Computing Project (ECP) will be critical.