The Application Perspective: Seeking Productivity and Performance

Abstract

In this note we propose two projects: (1) creating a hierarchical programming model from current models; and (2) extracting application primitives from the “13 dwarfs”. The first topic addresses the need for a unified and manageable framework for very large-scale concurrent execution. This is the productivity part: less complexity will drive better mapping of algorithms to architecture, which will also contribute to better performance. The second topic focuses mostly on the processor and the node with the aim of laying the groundwork for software and silicon optimized kernels. While it is understood that applications primitives are outside the scope of IESP, the motivation for introducing it here is that it is a companion issue and that increasing the efficiency of each processor provides high return for science, at all levels of system size.