This is a proposal to launch a coordinated international program on software for exascale computing. This will take the form of a series of three workshops to engage the appropriate national and international partners, develop the roadmap and create an aggressive plan for making sure the software is planned, budgeted and hopefully developed in time for the arrival of exascale computing. The project has deep support from the Department of Energy and international partners in the European Union and Japan. The support of NSF is being requested to help recruit the NSF community as founding partners in the program.
The project, being started at a time when we are still coming to grips with Petascale, is very timely in "the importance and urgency of the need it targets laying the foundations and initiating the implementation of future generations of software for very high performance computing." The software gap -- whereby efficient software to use on the latest architecture is only available years after the computer is available has bedevilled every generation of new high performance computers from the gigascale to the petascale. The dramatically different computer architectures that are envisioned for the exascale is likely to make this gap even more dramatic and perhaps render much of the exascale investments of little use without this type of coordianted and advance investment in the software.
