Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC):
Algorithms and Applications for Emerging Architectures
Computational simulation is a third modality for scientific discovery, engineering design, and
decision support, having emerged from six decades of algorithmic and hardware development
with the resolution capabilities and the culture of reproducibility necessary to stand alongside
theoretical and experimental approaches.
Since 1988, as measured by the Gordon Bell Prize,
simulation has improved by more than a factor of a million in performance (from Gigaflop/s to
many Petaflop/s) and by nearly a factor of a million in price/performance (from over $2.5M per
delivered Gigaflop/s to approximately $5 per Gigaflop/s, in the form of GPUs). However, because
of new architectural stresses, extreme simulation now stands at a crossroads; this drives the
research agenda of the ECRC.
