- 1.0 A New Product Development Paradigm
- 1.1 Computational Engineering and Virtual Prototypes
- 1.2 Computational Science and Digital Surrogates
- 1.3 The Computational Engineering and Science Ecosystem
- 1.4 High-Performance Computers: The Enablers
- 1.5 Full-Featured Virtual Prototypes
- 1.6 The Advantages of Virtual Prototyping for Systems of Systems
- 1.7 Virtual Prototyping: A Successful Product Development and Scientific Research Paradigm
- 1.8 Historical Perspective
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
1.4 High-Performance Computers: The Enablers
The principal driver and enabler of computational engineering and science is the exponential growth of computer performance since the end of World War II: 17 orders of magnitude. We are not aware of any other technical advance of this magnitude.
There are only several dozen supercomputers in the world with near-Exascale performance (1018 FLOPS), and only a handful of engineers and scientists at the world’s largest research and engineering facilities have access to these computers. However, many, if not most, scientists and engineers in major industries, universities, and government laboratories in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, now have access to supercomputers with processing powers in the PetaFLOP range (1 PetaFLOP=1015 FLOPS) (see Figure 1.6) (Strohmaier 2015). This enables them to tackle and solve problems at the leading edge of scientific research and engineering design. Also, there are thousands of powerful servers, and millions of desktop and laptop personal computers with processing power in the GFLOPS to TeraFLOPS range. It’s a “Brave New World,” and the industries, universities, and government laboratories not using these technologies are beginning to fall behind.
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Figure 1.6 History of supercomputer performance growth, 1945 to 2019 (Data is taken from the top500.org website, http://www.top500.org/; (Erich Strohmaier 2015); and historical data from LLNL and LANL, analyzed by Douglass Post.)