The NSF and other Federal agencies will require further understanding of concepts, methods, and means for Exascale computing systems before formulation of future programs in enabling technologies, architectures, and methodologies. NSF supports a targeted two-year program of investigation, The Exascale Point-design Study, to provide sufficient depth and detail of understanding of the interrelationships among possible enabling technologies, implementation architectures and operating system software, and programming interfaces and methodologies.
Working in consultation with LSU, USC, UIUC, UD, and Sandia National Laboratory (under DOE sponsorship), UT-Austin team focuses on energy efficiency as a key driver for Exascale systems. The PIs plan to investigate processor, memory system, and interconnect architectures that enable the exploitation of temporal and spatial locality, even when traditional memory hierarchies perform poorly. They plan to further investigate the use of hardware specialization as a means to accelerate critical components of applications in an energy-efficient fashion. UT-Austin plans to devise an Exascale architecture derived from prior research conducted under NSF, DOE, and DARPA sponsorship, reflecting some of the best-known principles and practices envisioned for hardware and software at the Exaflops scale.
