The IBM Roadrunner Supercomputer, with Petaflop capacity can be scaled
down in size and power consumption to
desktop form factor by expanding the size of the standard microchip to
that of a full 12 inch silicon wafer. Network
all the processing cores on the wafer together, with infiniband or
optics or other technologies, and you have a system of systems on a
very large silicon chip which is silicon wafer size. If this does not
provide enough processing power, any number of the silicon wafers with
the networked processor cores can be stacked vertically and
networked together. Power supply and heat dissipation will have to be
dealt with. The design can be optimised
using electronic design automation software, soft computing and
computational intelligence technologies. Thus,
you can produce petaflop processors in desktop form factor. This can
be called MacroProcessors on MacroChips.
Ian Martin Ajzenszmidt
