HiePACS is a joint project-team with the Research and Higher Cluster (PRES) of Bordeaux, CNRS (LaBRI UMR 5800) and is a Research Initiative of the joint Laboratory Inria-CERFACS on High Performance Computing. It has been created on the first of January 2010 and is leaded by Luc Giraud.
An important force which has continued to drive HPC has been to focus on frontier milestones which consist in technical goals that symbolize the next stage of progress in the field. In the 1990s, the HPC community sought to achieve computing at a teraflop rate and currently we are able to compute on the first leading architectures at a petaflop rate. Generalist petaflop supercomputers are likely to be available in 2010-2012 and some communities are already in the early stages of thinking about what computing at the exaflop level would be like. For application codes to sustain a petaflop and more in the next few years, hundreds of thousands of processor cores or more will be needed, regardless of processor technology. Currently, a few HPC simulation codes easily scale to this regime, and major code development efforts are critical to achieve the potential of these new systems. Scaling to a petaflop and more will involve improving physical models, mathematical modelling, super scalable algorithms that will require paying particular attention to acquisition, management and vizualization of huge amounts of scientific data.