Then and Now: Improving Software Portability, Productivity, and 100× Performance
The US Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has succeeded in preparing applications to run efficiently on the first reported Exascale supercomputers in the world. To achieve this, it modernized the whole leadership software stack, from libraries to simulation codes. In this article, we contrast selected leadership software before and after ECP. We discuss how sustainable research software development for leadership computing can embrace the conversation with the hardware vendors, the leadership computing facilities, the software community, and the domain scientists who are the application developers and integrators of software products. We elaborate on how software needs to take portability as a central design principle and to benefit from interdependent teams; we also demonstrate how moving to programming languages with high momentum, like modern C++, can help improve the sustainability, interoperability, and performance of research software. Finally, we showcase how cross-institutional efforts can enable algorithm advances that are beyond incremental performance optimization.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 2467430
- Journal Information:
- Computing in Science and Engineering, Journal Name: Computing in Science and Engineering Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 26; ISSN 1521-9615
- Publisher:
- IEEE Computer SocietyCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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