The International Exascale Software Project (IESP) brings together representatives from the major segments of the global high performance computing (HPC) community -- software research and development, leading edge scientific applications, leadership-class facilities, major system vendors and relevant government funding agencies -- in a proactive effort to plan and create a new software infrastructure for the extreme scale systems that represent the future of computational science. Through a series of workshops, begun in the spring of 2009 and rotating between the US, Europe, and Asia, the IESP and its international partners have endeavored to provide leadership in formulatung a long-term roadmap to an exascale-capable software infrastructure, and in initializing the corresponding research and development process necessary to produce it. As expressed in the IESP Roadmap version 1.0 (referenced below as "Roadmap" and published on May 30, 2010), the project's mission commits to a vision of the future of scientific computing that involves to two key objectives:
The guiding purpose of the IESP is to empower ultrahigh resolution and data intensive science and engineering research through the year 2020 by developing a plan for 1) a common, high quality computational environment for peta/exascale systems and for 2) catalyzing, coordinating, and sustaining the effort of the international open source software community to create that environment as quickly as possible. (Roadmap, p. 3)
In a series of workshops, rotating between the United States, Europe and Asia, IESP participants from all segments of the HPC community have begun to forge a working consensus on a plan to address the momentous challenge of creating a software stack for extreme-scale Computational Science, which we call an "X-stack." Building on this success, our proposed IESP workshop for the spring of 2012 in Chicago will focus on further developing and expanding upon the strategies identified in the plan in order to make more rapid progress toward the project's objectives.
