HPCwire: Application Requirements & Objectives for Petascale Systems

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February 22, 2008

Application Requirements & Objectives for Petascale Systems

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With its planned upgrade to a petaflop computer not far off, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) surveyed a broad user base to analyze and understand application requirements for these leadership systems. ORNL's Doug Kothe debriefed HPCwire on the findings.

HPCwire: What is your role at ORNL?

Doug Kothe: I'm director of science for the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at ORNL. My job is to facilitate the applications: porting, optimizing, improving existing algorithms, adding new algorithms, and frankly anything else needed to help our users achieve the best science output possible. It's a great job that keeps me close to the breakthrough research, although in this role I do not have as much time as I used to for writing scientific code myself.

HPCwire: Why did the NCCS undertake this study? What were the goals?

Kothe: The survey's main goal was twofold: first, to elicit and analyze scientific application requirements for current and planned leadership systems out to the petascale; and second, to identify applications that would qualify for early access to ORNL's 250-teraflop and 1-petaflop systems. Identifying user requirements for future-generation HPC systems is part of ORNL's original charter as a DOE Leadership Computing Facility. My job is to implement this process so the NCCS can select the appropriate HPC resources on behalf of the DOE Office of Science and our users.

I chair our Applications Requirements Council, which works with the scientific projects we host to identify the more specific requirements. This council incorporates these requirements in a document we hand off to the NCCS Technology Council. The Applications Requirements Council's role is to provide tactical, year-to-year input that helps the Technology Council take the longer view on technology acquisition and deployment and strategic thinking about next-generation architectures.

HPCwire: What do you mean by "next-generation architectures"?

Kothe: That generally refers to architectures that will be available in the next 1 to 3 years, so they're reasonably well defined. We have an opportunity to influence the generation after the next generation by working with the HPC vendors.

HPCwire: Are you already looking as far ahead as exascale systems?

Kothe: DOE and many of the agencies are already looking at exascale system requirements at a high level. Researchers at the leading edge of scientific discovery are demanding systems with greater and greater capability. What disruptive technologies will we need in order to provide the most effective resources? The next-generation systems after petaflop machines will probably be in the 10- to 30-petaflop peak range. The science, engineering, and national security drivers for these systems, on up to exascale systems, are very compelling.

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