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Paradigmatic shifts for exascale supercomputing

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Abstract

As the next generation of supercomputers reaches the exascale, the dominant design parameter governing performance will shift from hardware to software. Intelligent usage of memory access, vectorization, and intranode threading will become critical to the performance of scientific applications and numerical calculations on exascale supercomputers. Although challenges remain in effectively programming the heterogeneous devices likely to be utilized in future supercomputers, new languages and tools are providing a pathway for application developers to tackle this new frontier. These languages include open programming standards such as OpenCL and OpenACC, as well as widely-adopted languages such as CUDA; also of importance are high-quality libraries such as CUDPP and Thrust. This article surveys a purposely diverse set of proof-of-concept applications developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We find that the capability level of the accelerator computing hardware and languages has moved beyond the regular grid finite difference calculations and molecular dynamics codes. More advanced applications requiring dynamic memory allocation, such as cell-based adaptive mesh refinement, can now be addressed—and with more effort even unstructured mesh codes can be moved to the GPU.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ben Bergen and Marcus Daniels for the use of Darwin, the LANL CCS GPU cluster.

The authors are also grateful to the LANL CCS/X-Division Exascale working group led by Tim Kelley and to Scott Runnels for organizing the LANL X-Division Summer Workshop exascale group at which much of the foundational work for this article was performed. These groups encouraged the work on the applications in different computational domains.

This work was supported by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-06NA25396.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. XCP-4 Methods & Algorithms, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA

    Neal E. Davis, David Nicholaeff & Dennis P. Trujillo

  2. Department of Nuclear, Plasma, & Radiological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Neal E. Davis

  3. XCP-2 Eulerian Applications, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA

    Robert W. Robey

  4. HPC-1 Scientific Software Engineering, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA

    Charles R. Ferenbaugh

  5. Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    David Nicholaeff

  6. Department of Physics, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Dennis P. Trujillo

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  1. Neal E. Davis
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  2. Robert W. Robey
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  3. Charles R. Ferenbaugh
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  4. David Nicholaeff
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  5. Dennis P. Trujillo
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Correspondence to Neal E. Davis.

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Davis, N.E., Robey, R.W., Ferenbaugh, C.R. et al. Paradigmatic shifts for exascale supercomputing. J Supercomput 62, 1023–1044 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0789-3

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