Report on the ASCR Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Exascale Systems and Applications
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, NY (United States)
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
In the last few years, numerous studies commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and others have examined the challenges that will have to be overcome for computational science to achieve exascale, a two order-of-magnitude increase in capability beyond what is possible today. Exponential growth in the number of devices (Moore’s Law) is expected to continue unabated, but the end of Dennard scaling, and hence the growth in performance of individual processors, has led to exponential growth in concurrency. Power consumption has also grown to the point where the cost of the electrical power for systems threatens to exceed the cost of acquiring them. Ever-shrinking devices, and the growth in their number, are expected to increase the rate of soft, or transient, errors such that applications will no longer be able to assume correct behavior of the underlying machine. Adapting to such systems will require new mathematical algorithms that minimize synchronization and data movement, and a new generation of scientific software. Rather than addressing these issues in isolation, a new process of “Co-Design” is being pursued in which application and computer scientists work toward the common goal of an exascale ecosystem of systems and applications. Modeling and simulation (ModSim) is a critical part of this process. It enables scientists and engineers to analyze future algorithms, applications, and computing systems, long before they are realized, and make the necessary design decisions such that exascale science is broadly achieved. Later, when exascale applications and systems are realized, ModSim technology will enable us to understand their behavior, debugging and optimizing them. Given the increasing importance of modeling and simulation, a workshop was organized by DOE/ASCR to assess the current state of the art and to identify research challenges that must be overcome in this field. Fifty experts, representing academia, industry, and government, participated in the workshop, and others contributed both beforehand and afterwards. This report summarizes their findings.
- Research Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Washington, DC (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
- OSTI ID:
- 1372701
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: ASCR Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Exascale Systems and Applications, Seattle, WA, August 9-10, 2012
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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