ASCR Workshop

Call for Position Papers

Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Exascale Systems & Applications
September 18th-19th, 2013, Seattle, WA

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research

Workshop URL: http://hpc.pnl.gov/modsim/2013/
Submission URL: http://j.mp/modsim2013

SUBMISSIONS DUE ON JUNE 19 (11:59 PM EDT)

Meeting the performance, energy-efficiency, and resilience requirements of systems and applications at exascale will require rapid, accurate, and dynamic evaluation of tradeoffs. To provide these capabilities, significant advances in predictive modeling and simulation methods are needed. Models are key tools in the area of application/system co-design. As applications and systems evolve, models must be able to track ongoing complex changes and predict the impact of developments in both software and hardware design. While today's methods tend to focus on application performance as the metric of concern, modeling methods must evolve to consider performance, power consumption, and reliability in concert. It is critical to develop tools and techniques that will allow modeling capability to spread into the larger computational science community where it will have the greatest possible impact. Simulation and emulation capabilities must also expand along multiple directions, including scalability improvements, interoperability, support for exascale system design, and interfaces with modeling tools.

As part of the process, we solicit community input, in the form of position papers that describe novel research approaches for performance modeling and simulation at extreme scales. Position papers should address one or more of the following areas.

1. Development and generation of machine and application abstractions.

Application developers need new abstract machine models that expose expected hardware features (e.g., SIMD, lightweight cores, or specialized functional units) and performance targets in terms of hierarchical parallelism, scale, data movement, computational intensity, bandwidths, latencies, and storage capacities of possible exascale configurations, as well as non-performance objectives such as power and resilience. Meanwhile, system architects need architecture-independent models of important applications that they can use to identify, understand, and evaluate application behavior on these proposed architectures. These abstractions must exist across the modeling, simulation, and measurement infrastructures.

2. Dynamic and Actionable Modeling.

Modeling and simulation techniques must provide predictive and optimization capabilities at runtime. This will require the development of rapid evaluation techniques as well as interfaces for incorporating models into the layers within the software stack. In addition to dynamic model creation, models must be actionable. That is, the models must enable appropriate levels of the software stack to react to the instantaneous state of the system, both hardware and software, and provide the necessary information that can be used to guide and optimize system operation.

3. Standards, Integration, and Interoperability of ModSim Methodologies and Tools.

ModSim components will be integrated in different layers of the exascale software stack and must be able to interoperate and leverage common infrastructure including aspects such as time progression mechanisms (e.g. in discrete-event generation), parameter sharing, component querying for internal data, and interfaces to dynamic models.

Submissions

The Organizing Committee will review these position papers and invite selected contributors to participate in the workshop to be held on September 18th-19th, 2013, in Seattle, WA. Responsive submissions will be made public via the workshop website and selected papers will be included in a post-workshop proceedings.

The previous workshop report can be found at here, and submissions can be made with EasyChair at http://j.mp/modsim2013.

Requirements

Position papers (up to 2 pages) should describe a fundamental computer science research approach in the development of performance modeling and simulation approaches to address the key challenges associated with exascale computing systems. This description should be followed by a brief summary of related work and an assessment of the approach based on the following dimensions.
  1. Challenges addressed: Which exascale modeling and/or simulation challenges does this approach address?
  2. Maturity: What are the indicators that this approach will address the identified challenges?
  3. Uniqueness: To what extent is the proposed approach unique to exascale systems? Could it be addressed by other research programs?
  4. Novelty: How is this approach different from existing solutions?
  5. Applicability: To what extent will the proposed approach, if successful, be applicable to other areas?
  6. Effort: How much effort is needed to effectively explore this approach?

The paper may include any number of authors, but must provide contact information for a single "contact" author. There is no limit to the number of position papers that an individual or group can submit. Authors are strongly encouraged to follow the structure presented above. Authors of selected position papers will be invited to participate in a workshop based on the overall quality of the position paper(s) and our expectation that their inclusion in the workshop will stimulate constructive discussion by workshop participants. Unique positions that are well presented and emphasize transformative approaches will be given preference. Finaly, all position papers will be made available online on the workshop website.

Summary

  1. Length: Up to 2 pages (a list of cited references does not count against this limit).
  2. Due Date: 11:59 PM EDT on June 19th. Submission site: http://j.mp/modsim2013
  3. Notification of Selection for Workshop Presentation: July 12th.
  4. ModSim Workshop, September 18th-19th, 2013, Seattle, WA

Organizing Committee

Government:

This document can be downloaded in text form here.