A Credible Path to Exascale

by Jonathan Cohen

Emerging Applications, NVIDIA


Abstract

The hunt is on worldwide to build the first exascale computers – that is, machines 3 orders of magnitude more powerful than today’s top super computers.  There are a number of obstacles along the path to achieving this level of performance on real-world computations, ranging from economic feasibility, challenges with reaching the required level of energy efficiency in hardware, and difficulty designing algorithms capable of scaling to the necessary level of parallelism.  In this talk, I will describe some of these key challenges in detail, and explain ongoing work at NVIDIA and elsewhere to address them.

Speaker Bio

Jonathan Cohen leads the Emerging Applications group as part of NVIDIA’s Content and Technology organization. Emerging Applications seeks to develop enabling technologies that will allow end-users to access the power of GPU computing in a wide variety of application areas. Previously, he spent three years as a senior research scientist with NVIDIA Research developing scientific computing and real-time physical simulation applications on NVIDIA’s massively parallel GPUs.

Prior to joining NVIDIA, Mr. Cohen worked in the Hollywood feature film visual effects industry, where he developed software for films including “The Cat in the Hat” and “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” He led development of the sand simulation and rendering system for “Spider-Man 3” as a Computer Graphics Supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Mr. Cohen was awarded an Academy Award (Technical Achievement Award) in 2007 from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for his work on fluid simulation and volumetric modeling for visual effects.  He received an undergraduate degree from Brown in Mathematics and Computer Science.