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The International Exascale Software Project: a Call To Cooperative Action By the Global High-Performance Community

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE, THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, USA, DONGARRA{at}EECS.UTK.EDU

Pete Beckman

ARGONNE LEADERSHIP COMPUTING FACILITY, ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, USA

Patrick Aerts

NETHERLANDS ORGANISATION FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, THE NETHERLANDS

Frank Cappello

INRIA, LABORATOIRE EN RECHERCHE INFORMATIQUE, FRANCE

Thomas Lippert

JÜLICH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTRE, GERMANY

Satoshi Matsuoka

TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, JAPAN

Paul Messina

ARGONNE LEADERSHIP COMPUTING FACILITY, ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, USA

Terry Moore

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE, THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, USA

Rick Stevens

COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT AND LIFE SCIENCES DIVISION, ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, USA

Anne Trefethen

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, OXFORD, UK

Mateo Valero

TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF CATALONIA, SPAIN

Over the last 20 years, the open-source community has provided more and more software on which the world’s high-performance computing systems depend for performance and productivity. The community has invested millions of dollars and years of effort to build key components. 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. A repository gatekeeper and an email discussion list can coordinate open-source development within a single project, but there is no global mechanism working across the community to identify critical holes in the overall software environment, spot opportunities for beneficial integration, or specify requirements for more careful coordination. 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. We believe the community must work together to prepare for the challenges of exascale computing, ultimately combing their efforts in a coordinated International Exascale Software Project.

Key Words: exascale • software • international • applications • scientific computing

This version was published on November 1, 2009

International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Vol. 23, No. 4, 309-322 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1094342009347714


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