Tilak Agerwala, vice president of systems at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, is trying to take some of the pain out of supercomputing.
In a variety of projects with various universities and national laboratories, Agerwala is working on ways to reduce the cost of installing, but also using, supercomputers and high-performance clusters.
In the PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System) program, for instance, the idea is to build a machine that can optimise itself with a variety of applications, which should cut down the time required to develop the underlying programs needed to conduct complex research projects. It will operate at a petaflop, or one quadrillion calculations per second.
In the TRIPS (Tera-op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System), IBM and the University of Texas are working on a "supercomputer on a chip" that will be capable of running one trillion applications a second.
Agerwala spoke with CNET News.com about the challenges system architects face and the next horizon of big problems.
Q: Can you give a quick overview of your job?
A: I am responsible for developing the advanced hardware and software technology for servers, supercomputers and embedded systems. It is a pretty wide range of disciplines -- we go all the way from circuits to design automation tools to microprocessor architecture to operating systems and an on-demand operating environment.
It seems that system architecture, particularly on the hardware side, is more active than normal. Is that the case or just my imagination?
I would say that these are very exciting times. One thing happening in high-performance computing is that it really demands special attention now, because it is playing a central role in contemporary science and engineering that is kind of without precedence.
This is driven by exponential improvement in performance. We are able to consistently solve more complex problems more frequently and at lower cost. It is possible to have three different kinds of impact. One is to solve complex problems to enable economic growth, to advance industry and science and to address the mission-critical, computationally intense problems of the nation.
I think that there is a confluence of events that is saying that the high-performance community can actually address both the national-security kind of issues and accelerate economic growth.
