SCD SEMINAR:
DARPA High Productivity
Computing Systems Program and
the
Path Towards Usable Petascale Computing*
Dr.
Jeremy Kepner, MIT
Abstract
High Performance
Computing has seen extraordinary growth in peak performance from Megaflops to
Teraflops in the past decades. This
increase in performance has been accompanied by a large shift away from the
original national security user base of the 1970s and 1980s to more
commercially oriented applications (e.g., bioinformatics and
entertainment). In addition, there has
been a significant increase in the difficulty of using these systems, which is
now the domain of highly specialized experts.
In
response to these trends the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS)
program was established to produce a new generation of economically viable high
productivity computing systems for the national security and for the industrial
user communities. The primary technical
goals of the program are to produce petascale
computers that can better run national security applications and are usable by
a broader range of scientists and engineers.
The HPCS program is fostering many technological innovations. One of the most important is the concept of a
flatter memory hierarchy, which means that data from remote processors can be
retrieved and used very efficiently. A
flatter memory hierarchy will result in a significant performance increase (up
to 2000x) in certain important classes of applications. In addition, a flatter memory hierarchy is
much easier to program because the user doesn’t have to worry as much about
precisely tailoring their application to avoid the high cost of retrieving
data.
To measure the memory
hierarchy the HPCS program has developed the HPC Challenge benchmark suite and
has sponsored the HPC Challenge contest that awards a prize for the best
performance on each benchmark. In
addition, there is also a coding contest, which rewards the best and most
clearly written implementations of the benchmarks. This talk will discuss the results of the
first HPC Challenge contest, as well as provide an overview of the HPCS
program.
Date, Time, and Location:
NCAR Mesa Lab Chapman Room