Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have proposed a new model for supercomputers. The proposed model would use low-power embedded microprocessors, an approach that would overcome limitations posed by today's conventional supercomputers.

Supercomputers capable of tasks such as modeling clouds at the 1- kilometer scale are usually built by increasing the number of microprocessors at a cost of about $1 billion–plus they require about 200 megawatts of electricity to operate.

The approach proposed by Michael Wehner, Lenny Olike, and John Shalf in Towards Ultra-High Resolution models of Climate and Weather would use about 20 million embedded microprocessors at a cost of $75 million to build, require less than 4 megawatts of power, and operate at a peak performance of 200 petaflops.

To move this into reality, the Lab has signed an agreement with Tensilica to explore new design concepts for energy-efficient, high-performance scientific computer systems. The effort focuses on novel processor and systems architectures using large numbers of small processor cores, connected with optimized links, and tuned to the requirements of highly parallel applications such as climate modeling. Under the agreement, the research team will use Tensilica's Xtensa LX2 extensible processor cores as the basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design. Each processor will dissipate a few hundred milliwatts of power, yet deliver billions of floating-point operations per second and be programmable using conventional programming languages and tools.