There is currently a world-wide quest to achieve exascale computing by the end of the decade, with vigorous efforts in the US as well as China and Japan, in particular. In the US, the President's Strategy for American Innovation (2009) explicitly lists among its goals to dramatically increase our simulations capacity via an exascale computer. The challenges to achieve this goal are unprecedented: power constraints, microchip fabrication reaching physical limits, the growing imbalance between compute capacity and interconnect bandwidth, and the ever increasing number of cores in a system.
Among the matters of highest priority are development of scalable algorithms that can exploit the enormous parallelism of new systems, and educating the next generation of computational scientists. The first of these is at the center of the scientific part of this CAREER project. A potentially transformative combination is emerging where a class of hierarchical algorithms, offering ideal scaling linear with problem size, maps with excellent performance to many-core hardware (such as GPUs). Algorithmic improvements will be undertaken, such as combining elements of treecodes and fast multipole methods, communication and synchronization avoidance, dynamic error control and auto-tuning of the computation. The research program is vertically integrated across disciplines, including applications at extreme scales in fluid dynamics and biological systems.
This project will produce highly scalable scientific software, reformulating the algorithms to achieve maximum performance in many-core hardware. Disseminated and curated via the open-source model, the computational infrastructure delivered will offer maximum impact, beyond the application areas of focus. Community software that is able to scale to millions of processors will be crucial to exploit post-petascale systems, and this project aims to provide that. The educational part of this program, on the other hand, builds on the PI's track record of success both in the use of technology to support learning, and in catalyzing international collaboration and outreach. The program includes enhancing educational environments using technology for both curricular instruction and contributing to the nation's science literacy (via open courseware). The goals of fostering the next generation of computational scientists will be pursued via extra-mural advanced training events, and online learning media.
