It isn't comparable to the sound barrier, but it was still a challenge.
It took significantly longer than it should have if it was just business as usual: "At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018." [1]
We got the first true exascale system with Frontier in 2022.
Part of the problem was the power consumption and having a purely CPU based system online for an exascale job. From slide 12 from[2]: "Aggressive design is at 70 MW" and "HW failure every 35 minutes".
It took significantly longer than it should have if it was just business as usual: "At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018." [1]
We got the first true exascale system with Frontier in 2022.
Part of the problem was the power consumption and having a purely CPU based system online for an exascale job. From slide 12 from[2]: "Aggressive design is at 70 MW" and "HW failure every 35 minutes".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exascale_computing [2]: https://wgropp.cs.illinois.edu/bib/talks/tdata/2011/aramco-k...