Trends in system cost and performance balances and implications for the future of HPC

For the last decade, HPC systems have been dominated by clusters of two-socket commodity x86 servers, typically equipped with a non-commodity high-performance interconnect. Trends in lifecycle costs and prices, hardware technology, several measures of CPU and memory performance, and application performance characteristics are presented using several non-traditional perspectives. The evolution of the various "balances" of the systems over time is discussed --- both in the context of the interaction of application performance with the changing hardware, and in the context of the broader economic environment. Several serious obstacles to maintaining previous performance growth rates are identified and discussed, and it is argued that these are better viewed as architectural and market issues, rather than as fundamental technology issues. It is argued that overcoming these obstacles will require a fundamentally different approach to hardware architecture and programming languages, as well as to system configuration, deployment, and allocation strategies.