Erik Draeger: Supercomputing at the exascale and beyond: future trends and challenges

MICDE / ME Seminar: Erik Draeger, Director of the High Performance Computing Innovation Center and RADIUSS project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Abstarct: For the past seven years, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has funded a comprehensive push to refactor 24 application projects to efficiently utilize exascale computing hardware to solve a varied set of complex science and engineering problems. Ambitious performance and capability goals were set for each application that demanded end-to-end rethinking of traditional approaches. Through detailed performance analysis, integration with optimized co-design frameworks and software libraries, and the use of programming abstractions to manage data placement and kernel execution, ECP applications recently demonstrated substantial capability and performance improvements on newly-available exascale machines. Despite significant diversity in the methods and algorithms underlying the ECP application portfolio, several common themes emerged in how to best adapt computational workloads to heterogeneous architectures. In this talk, an overview of best practices and lessons learned on effectively utilizing exascale hardware from the perspective of ECP applications will be presented. Strategies for developing portable, performant code will be discussed and examples of reexamining traditional algorithms and methods will be described. Armed with this knowledge, researchers can go beyond simply surviving an uncertain and turbulent computing future to instead leading a wave of scientific and computational innovation as traditional approaches are reexamined and new approaches adopted.