By: TOP500 Team

by Barry Bolding, Cray

From new processor technologies to quantum computing, 2016 promises to be another exciting year for supercomputing. Here are five predictions as to how the industry will push ahead in 2016:

1. The year of progress in new processor technologies

There are a number of exciting technologies we should see in 2016, and a leader will be Intel’s next-generation Xeon Phi coprocessor — a hybrid between an accelerator and general purpose processor. This new class of processors will have a large impact on the industry with its innovative design that combines a many-core architecture with general-purpose productivity. Cray, for example, will be delivering Intel Xeon Phi processors with some of our largest systems, including those going to Los Alamos National Labs (the “Trinity” supercomputer) and NERSC (the “Cori” supercomputer).

2016 should also see innovation and advances by NVIDIA with their cutting-edge Pascal GPUs, and the continuing ARM innovations will also drive a competitive environment in the processor game.

2. A quantum leap

Quantum computing will both be/not be an exciting technology in 2016. Now that Google has confirmed that their system from D-Wave is performing quantum annealing, we expect more headlines to follow; but by the end of the year, the industry will still struggle to understand exactly what it is, or what it will be most useful for. This is certainly a new and exciting technology, and the excitement it generates is good for the industry, but it still won’t be a truly productive technology in 2016, or 2020, or perhaps even 2025 for that matter.

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Read the full article on Scientific Computing.