Productive Petascale Computing: Requirements, Hardware, and Software
Michael L. Van De Vanter, Alan Wood, Christopher A. Vick, Stuart R. Faulk, Susan Squires, Lawrence G. Votta · 2009
Supercomputer designers traditionally focus on low-level hardware performance criteria such as CPU cycle speed, disk bandwidth, and memory latency. The High-Performance Computing (HPC) community has more recently begun to realize that escalating hardware performance is, by itself, contributing less and less to real productivity—the ability to develop and deploy high-performance supercomputer applications at acceptable time and cost. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative challenged industry vendors to design a new generation of supercomputers that would deliver a 10x improvement in this newly acknowledged but poorly understood domain of real productivity. Sun Microsystems, choosing to abandon customary evolutionary approaches, responded with two revolutionary decisions. The first was to investigate the nature of supercomputer productivity in the full context of use, which includes people, organizations, goals, practices, and skills as well as processors, disks, memory, and software. The second decision was to rethink completely the design of supercomputing systems, informed by productivity-based requirements and driven by recent technological breakthroughs. Crucial to the implementation of these decisions was the establishment of multidisciplinary, closely collaborating teams that conducted research