Exascale Operating Systems and Runtime Software Report
Pete Beckman, Ron Brightwell, Maya B. Gokhale, Bronis R. de Supinski, Steven A. Hofmeyr, Sriram Krishnamoorthy, Mike Lang, Arthur B. ‘Barney’ Maccabe, John M. Shalf, Marc Snir · 2012
Here U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) workshops and reports have identified four key exascale challenges: dramatically improving power efficiency; improving resilience in the presence of increasing faults; enabling efficient data movement across deepening memory hierarchies and new storage technologies; and managing dramatically increased parallelism, especially at the node level. Software solutions that address these challenges must also improve programmability, expanding the community of computational scientists who can use leadership-class platforms. To address these challenges, DOE must develop new techniques, novel designs, and advanced software architectures for next-generation exascale software infrastructure. In this report, we discuss challenges and approaches to exascale operating system and runtime (OS/R) software. The Exascale Operating Systems and Runtime (OS/R) Software Technical Council canvassed hardware architects, application programmers, parallel tool developers, DOE high-performance computing (HPC) facilities, and the vendors that sell and support integrated platforms. After considering the collective requirements of these constituents and examining the future research challenges and current software gaps, the council recommends that DOE invest in targeted advanced computer science research and in specific coordinating activities to enable the effective and successful development of anticipated exascale systems.