The tight coupling that now exists between accelerating progress in nearly every critical scientific field and increasing the availability of high performance computing (HPC) means that agencies committed to supporting leading edge research will have to continue, or even expand, their investment in high end computing capacity. Unfortunately, the radical changes in system architecture that new extreme scale platforms are bringing with them (massive concurrency, processor heterogeneity, constrained power budgets, and complex memory architectures) are also crippling our ability to make such investment decisions in a rational and well-informed way. In particular, tools such as the HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite, which have played a vitally important role in evaluating the impact of system design choices on the performance of scientific applications, are not as well adapted as they need to be to the incredible complexities of emerging supercomputing platforms. Our proposed plan for supporting and enhancing the HPCC benchmark for hybrid-multicore computers is designed to maintain and extend the effectiveness of this essential tool.
Accordingly, our plan for updating and enhancing HPCC will focus on three main areas of activity: 1) investigate new rules for benchmark execution; 2) improve scalability of benchmark for future architectures; and 3) expand community interaction.
In terms of contributing to national cyberinfrastructure, the planned work builds upon and strengthens our ongoing collaborations with NSF Centers and HPC vendors. We are involved in the NSF Centers and have a wide collection of users and applications to draw on. These facilities contribute software and expertise to HPCC and will provide an early operational testbed for new technologies and application concepts to be developed for HPCC. Responses to our plans from vendors have been encouraging. With their cooperation, we will produce software that will be transitioned to the commercial software vendors to complete the development that we have initiated and provide these new capabilities to their customers in the research community.
