Solving scientific grand challenges requires effective use of cyber infrastructure. Future computing platforms, including Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), multi-core and multi-threaded processors, and Cloud computing platforms, can dramatically accelerate innovation to solve complex problems of societal importance when supported by a critical mass of sustainable software.
This project will organize scientific communities to help leverage the disruptive potential of future computing platforms through sustainable software. Grand challenge problems in biological science, social science, and security domains will be targeted based on their under-served needs and demonstrated possibilities. Users will be engaged through interdisciplinary workshops that bring together domain experts with software technologists with the goals of identifying core opportunity areas, determining critical software infrastructure, and discovering software sustainability challenges. The outcome will be an in-depth conceptual design for a Center for Sustainable Software on Future Computing Platforms, as part of the Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program. The design, scoped toward grand challenge problems, will identify common and specialized software infrastructure, research, development and outreach priorities, and coordination with the SSE and SSI components of the SI2 program. The interactions will offer a comprehensive understanding of grand challenges that best map to future computing platforms and the software infrastructure to best support scientists' needs. The workshops will enhance understanding of future platforms' potential for transformative research and lead to key insights into cross-cutting problems in leveraging their potential. Published results will help guide future research and reduce barriers to entry for under-represented groups.
This is a report on the activities and outcomes of the Accelerating Grand Challenge Data-Intensive Problems using Future Computing Platforms Project supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the call for Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2) Conceptualization Proposals [NSF 11-589]. Solving scientific grand challenges requires effective use of cyberinfrastructure (CI). Recent advances in computing technology can dramatically accelerate innovation to solve complex problems of societal importance. These Future Computing Platforms include multi-core and many-core processors, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and cloud computing. Future platforms provide distinctive features of energy efficiency and performance beneficial to under-served scientific domains. Software forms the gateway for scientific research communities to access CI, and scientists need a critical mass of sustainable software to benefit from future platforms’ transformative potential. This project aimed to organize scientific communities to leverage the disruptive potential of future computing platforms while managing the software sustainability challenges that hamper solving grand challenge problems. In workshops, panels, and face-to-face meetings we engaged domain scientists from biology and biomedicine, and computer science researchers working with various future plat- forms. The goal of these engagements was to produce an in-depth conceptual design for a center that will enable scientists to leverage the disruptive potential of future computing platforms while managing the software sustainability challenges that hamper solving data-intensive grand challenge problems. Conceptualization Activities: The PIs envisioned the major activities including three interdisciplinary domain-focused workshops (in biological sciences, social networking, and cybersecurity) where experts in aspects of grand challenge problems and software components in the given domain identify core opportunity areas, determine critical software infrastructure, and discover software sustainability challenges. In our initial exploratory work included: (1) A kick-off meeting of the PIs and CoPIs, where we (a) refined the focus of our conceptualization efforts to data-intensive grand challenge problems enabled by graph algorithms and (b) determined initial members of our steering committee: Neil Chu Hong (Software Sustainability Institute, UK), Rob Schreiber (Hewlett Packard Laboratories), Mark Snir (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). (2) A "BIO- and CISE-related NSF-SI2 activities Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), Salt Lake City UT. (3) Face-to-face meetings with domain experts and leaders cyberinfrastructure. Through these engagements, we concluded that for the social networking and cybersecurity domains these goals could be achieved through smaller-scale interactions, while we could best understand the opportunities and challenges in biological sciences through a series of workshops and targeted engagements with specific individuals and groups. Findings -- A Plan for a Center for Future Computing Platforms (FCP): The overall goal of the envisioned FCP center that resulted from these conceptualization activities, would be to investigate, build, distribute, and maintain software that will spur innovation in scientific computing over an extended period of time. The center should stay abreast of current and emerging technologies like multi-core, GPU and FPGA accelerators for supporting and rapidly advancing science, and provide guidance to the scientific user community. A strong software design and development team should build and maintain reliable, usable, and extensible software, organically and from user, developer, and business communities. The center should be a knowledge repository that provides tutorials and training on new software and technologies supported by the center, offers consulting services to help scientists use the available software including long-term engagement, and shares best practices that may even be standardized. The strategic plan that result from these conceptualization activities also outlined role, structure, resources, operations, governance, and community engagement mechanisms for the center.
