Publications Details

Co-design in ACES and exascale

The Alliance for Computing at the Extreme Scale (ACES) is a Los Alamos and Sandia collaboration encompassing not only HPC procurements and operations, but also computer science and architecture research and development. One area of focus within ACES relates to the critical technology developments for future high performance computing systems and the applications that would run on them, and ACES is heavily involved in the proposed DOE Exascale Initiative. The proposed Exascale Initiative emphasizes the need for co-design, which is the three-way collaborative and concurrent design of HPC hardware, software, and the applications themselves. Transformational changes will occur not only in HPC hardware, but also in the applications space, and taken together these will require transformation changes in the overall software layers supporting the programming models, tools, runtimes, file systems, and operating systems. Co-design involving all three areas of hardware, software, and applications will be the key to success. This talk will outline key aspects of the Exascale Initiative and its emphasis on co-design. It will provide some examples from LANL & Sandia experiences in co-design including aspects of the innovative Roadrunner architecture and software, a ACES-Cray project studying advanced interconnects within Cray, and Sandia's work in computer system simulators and mini-applications.