ASCR Workshop

Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Exascale Systems & Applications
August 9-10, 2012
University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Organizing Committee:

Adolfy Hoisie, Darren Kerbyson, Bob Lucas, Arun Rodrigues, John Shalf, Allan Snavely, Jeffrey Vetter

ASCR Point of Contact:

William Harrod, Sonia Sachs

Workshop Description:

Multiple significant technical challenges punctuate the path to Exascale. Millions of threads of parallelism need be tractable and manageable. New algorithms and programming models may be required that can utilize these extreme levels of parallelism and can be efficiently mapped to system resources.

Power efficiency is emerging as the overarching design constraint. The cost of data movement in both power and performance is larger than the cost of the arithmetic and may be one order of magnitude or more, higher on the way to Exascale using current technologies. High-speed interconnect networks and communication mechanisms need to cope with the realities of size and complexity within a limited power envelope, which may require streamlined lower-dimensionality topologies. The increase in the depth of memory hierarchies, including additional layers in the I/O and storage subsystem design through the likely addition of power efficient non-volatile memories, leads to increased distances for data to travel as well as increased programming complexity.

An important issue to overcome with Exascale is the intrinsic limitation in reliability given the size and complexity of the systems that will require increased resiliency. There is no one size fits all solution and the challenge ahead is dealing with the combined reliability & power & performance requirements and their tradeoffs at all levels of the stack between the hardware and application.

In a nutshell, at this juncture in time when the HPC community led by DOE is embarking on the path to Exascale, the issue of optimal co-design of Exascale applications and systems takes center stage.

This workshop is convened to address the role of modeling and simulation, as a set of methodologies, in guiding the optimal co-design of Exascale systems and applications. In the 1 ½ days of this event we plan to:

It is expected the outcome of the workshop will impact not only Exascale, but the HPC community in general. We anticipate that this event will be the first in a series with the goal of assessing our progress and point to areas in need of increased emphasis.