BSC Vision Towards Exascale

Abstract

This paper provides the vision of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center towards exascale computing. We believe that it is key to have unified views of future computer systems, looking at the good ideas, developments, and practices from the past and applying them at the scalability levels we want to consider. The programming model is of Alexander’s sword used to break the Gordian knot of exascale systems based on massive multicore architectures. The implementation of the programming model should decouple the way programs are written by the user (parallelism, address spaces, etc.) and executed by the runtime (execution vehicles, memory containers, malleability and load balancing, fault tolerance, etc.) on a specific target architecture. At the application level, it will be crucial to ensure that application porting is going to guarantee their survival for some decades or their clean upgrade to the foreseeable explosion of hardware platforms. Performance tools and analysis practices are in their infancy with regard to providing the required exascale support. BSC would like to contribute with this vision and ongoing efforts to the holistic exascale initiative.