HPCS has chosen, and the winners are ...

Cray and IBM. Congratulations to them. HPCS is about making supercomputers more productive for end users. How to leverage tremendous efficiencies, build better languages for faster, better, more accurate development. I was very impressed with Chapel. IBM’s looked like a Java derivative, as verbose and opaque as Java usually is (it is often hard to discern what Java is doing from Java source).

Regardless of this, now we can see where this will go. Cray’s XT4 and followons should prove very interesting. If they have a Chapel compiler, I would like to play with it. I have UPC here from SC06, and will try that some time next month. Remember that the top supercomputers now are on the order of 0.1 and 0.2 PetaFLOP. Giving the 100x promised speedup, this will get them to 10-20 PetaFLOP. Or put another way, 0.01 to 0.02 ExaFLOP. Anyone want to guess which OS will (or will not) run on these machines?