Using the TOP500 to trace and project technology and architecture trends

The TOP500 is a treasure trove of information on the leading edge of high performance computing. It was used in the 2008 DARPA Exascale technology report to isolate out the effects of architecture and technology on high performance computing, and lay the groundwork to project how current systems might mature through the coming years. Two particular classes of architectures were identified: "heavy-weight" (based on high end commodity microprocessors) and "lightweight," (primarily BlueGene variants), and projections made on performance, concurrency, memory capacity, and power. This paper updates those projections, and adds a third class of "heterogeneous" architectures (leveraging the emerging class of GPU-like chips) to the mix.