[Todos] Software Challenges for Extreme Scale Systems

[Esteban Mocskos]

Lunes 10/6 11:00hs
Laboratorio Turing (Departamento de Computación - FCEN / UBA)

Profesor Vivek Sarkar, E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, Rice
University, Houston, Texas, USA

ABSTRACT:

It is widely recognized that  computer systems in the
next decade will be qualitatively different from current
and past computer systems.  Specifically, they will be built using
homogeneous and heterogeneous many-core processors with 100's of
cores per chip, their performance will be driven by parallelism
(million-way parallelism just for a departmental server), and
constrained by energy and data movement.  They will also be subject to
frequent faults and failures.  Unlike previous generations of hardware
evolution, these Extreme Scale systems will have a profound impact on
future software.  The software challenges are further compounded by
the need to support new workloads and application domains
that have traditionally not had to worry about large scales of
parallelism in the past.

The challenges across the entire software stack for Extreme Scale
systems are driven by programmability and performance requirements,
and impose new requirements on programming models, languages,
compilers, and runtime systems.
We focus on the critical role played by the runtime
system in enabling programmability in upper layers of the software
stack that interface with the programmer, and in enabling performance
in lower levels of the software stack that interface with the
hardware.  Examples of key runtime primitives will be drawn from early
experiences in the Habanero Multicore Software Research project [1]
which targets a wide range of homogeneous
and heterogeneous manycore processors.  Application experiences
will be discussed from the medical imaging domain, based on research
under way in the NSF Expeditions Center for Domain-Specific Computing [2].

Background material for this talk will be drawn in part from the
DARPA Exascale Software Study report [3] led by the
speaker.  This talk will also draw from a recent (March 2013) study led
by the speaker on Synergistic Challenges in Data-Intensive Science
and Exascale Computing [4] for the US Department of Energy's Office of
Science.  We would like to acknowledge the contributions of all
participants in both studies.

BIO:

Vivek Sarkar conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel
software including programming languages, program analysis, compiler
optimizations and runtimes for parallel and high performance computer
systems.  He currently leads the Habanero Multicore Software Research
project at Rice University, and serves as Associate Director of the
NSF Expeditions project on the Center for Domain-Specific Computing.
Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Vivek was Senior Manager of
Programming Technologies at IBM Research.  His responsibilities at IBM
included leading IBM's research efforts in programming model, tools,
and productivity in the PERCS project during 2002- 2007 as part of the
DARPA High Productivity Computing System program.  His past projects
include the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual
Machine for the Java language, the MIT RAW multicore project, the ASTI
optimizer used in IBM's XL Fortran product compilers, the PTRAN
automatic parallelization system, and profile-directed partitioning
and scheduling of Sisal programs.  Vivek holds a B.Tech. degree from
the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from
University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
He became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the
E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was
inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008.  Vivek has been serving as a member
of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing
Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009.

REFERENCES:
[1] Habanero Multicore Software Research project.  http://habanero.rice.edu.
[2] Center for Domain-Specific Computing.  http://cdsc.ucla.edu.
[3] DARPA Exascale Software Study report, September 2009.
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mrichard/ExascaleComputingStudyReports/ECS_reports.htm.
[4] DOE report on Synergistic Challenges in Data-Intensive Science
and Exascale Computing, March 2013.
http://science.energy.gov/~/media/ascr/ascac/pdf/reports/2013/ASCAC_Data_Intensive_Computing_report_final.pdf.