The International Exascle Software Project was created to empower ultra-high resolution and data-intensive science and engineering research through the year 2020. Now, IESP has published an 82-page roadmap that charts the way forward:
Over the last twenty years, the open source community has provided more and more software on which the world’s High Performance Computing (HPC) systems depend for performance and productivity. The community has invested millions of dollars and years of effort to build key components. But although the investments in these separate software elements have been tremendously valuable, a great deal of productivity has also been lost because of the lack of planning, coordination, and key integration of technologies necessary to make them work together smoothly and efficiently, both within individual PetaScale systems and between different systems. It seems clear that this completely uncoordinated development model will not provide the software needed to support the unprecedented parallelism required for peta/exascale computation on millions of cores, or the flexibility required to exploit new hardware models and features, such as transactional memory, speculative execution, and GPUs. This report describes the work of the community to prepare for the challenges of exascale computing, ultimately combing their efforts in a coordinated International Exascale Software Project.
The next IESP workshop will take place in Kyoto, Japan, on April 6-7, 2011.
