HPCwire: Welcome to Year 1 AP

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June 23, 2009

Welcome to Year 1 AP

by John West, for HPCwire

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On Wednesday at ISC'09 Thomas Sterling, the Arnaud & Edwards Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University and longtime HPC innovator, will give a keynote presentation looking back and what we've achieved in the past year, and what we are likely to see next as we cross into the petaflops era. We caught up with him before the session to talk about that keynote, and to get his sense for where our community's next challenges will lie.

Thomas Sterling

HPCwire: Your keynote talk on Wednesday will both look back at the major accomplishments of reaching a petaflops of performance and a look forward to exaflops. The petaflops achievement was an important engineering accomplishment, but what does it mean for Joe the Plumber? Why should he care?

Thomas Sterling: We as a world society are bound by decisions and actions taken concerning the environment, energy, biomedical, agriculture, financial, and peace maintenance, as well as an economy driven in large part by innovation. Such decisions and opportunities must be founded in high confidence quantitative understanding of the choices and their consequences. HPC is emerging as the principal means of deriving such knowledge through simulation and data analysis.

Joe the Plumber need not worry about the subtle nuances of HPC systems in order to care that this dimension of social change succeeds. Each epoch of our field has seen new advances that have catalyzed myriad others, enabling industry advances and government policies to undertake the best course of action on behalf of all of us. Yet, critical challenges still remain to be resolved that demand orders of magnitude increase in affordable sustained performance.

Here in year 1 AP (After Petaflops), we mark both the accomplishment and the challenge to fulfill our obligation to Joe to serve as stewards of Earth's limited resources while expanding our innate knowledge and capability for its people and future generations.

HPCwire: What are the major achievements of this past year in both hardware and software?

Sterling: The major accomplishments of the past year have been the learning curves in which the HPC community has been engaged in four areas: 1) programming multicore, 2) working at petaflops scale, 3) harnessing GPU accelerators, and 4) defining a path toward exascale system design and usage.

Multicore, arguably the most immediate of the challenges in an admittedly crowded space, is the target of commercial and academic research to provide effective programming methodologies. One or probably multiple solutions to this problem are required to sustain the anticipated exponential growth of observed user application performance with the increase in number of cores per socket driven by Moore's Law. Intel's TBB, Microsoft's Concert, MIT's Cilk, and our own (LSU's) ParalleX are among the different implementation approaches being pursued.

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