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The Future of Supercomputing An Interim Report (2003) / Chapter Skim
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4. Future Supercomputing and Research
Pages 22-27

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From page 22...
... The need for basic research in supercomputing is particularly acute. Although there has been basic research in general-purpose computing technologies with broad markets, and there has been significant expenditure in advanced development efforts such as the ASC program and the TeraGrid, there has been relatively little investment in basic research in supercomputing architecture and software over the past decade, resulting in few innovations to be incorporated into today's supercomputer systems.
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From page 23...
... A smaller number of technology demonstration systems can draw on the successes of basic research in architecture, software, and applications concepts, demonstrate their interplay, and validate concepts ahead of their use in production systems. It is important that such pilot systems be built because without real hardware platforms, systems software and applications programs will not be written nor will the experience gained from such system building be acquired.
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From page 24...
... By incorporating notions of parallelism in the virtual machine described above some issues of sequential orientation also might be mitigated.3 SOFTWARE RESEARCH at, The development of scalable scientific codes today is a laborious process. Mathematical algorithms are translated by a programmer into detailed programs and tuned to a specific architecture using programming notations that reflect the underlying architecture a manual, error-intensive process.
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From page 25...
... A parallel application is not an entity that is recognized as a whole by the distributed operating system; there are no standardized parallel operating system services (e.g., parallel scheduling, parallel I/O, parallel memory management) , although some implementations exist and are used.
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From page 26...
... These data may be represented by a diversity of data structures, including tables of numbers, irregular graphs, adaptive meshes, relational databases, two- or three-dimensional images, text, or various combined representations. Extracting scientific meaning from these data requires coupling numerical, statistical, and logical modeling techniques in ways that are unique to each discipline.
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From page 27...
... originated in research labs and universities. The arguments for government funding of supercomputing that are outlined in the next section apply as well to supercomputing application software: markets are likely to underinvest in such software, the government is an early and main customer for many such packages, and ISV codes are heavily used in weapon design.
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Key Terms

  • continuous investment
  • programming languages
  • hardware platforms
  • computer industry
  • data structures

  • applications software
  • supercomputing applications
  • cycle time
  • user community
  • heat flow

  • processor cycle
  • parallel application
  • software research
  • latency tolerance
  • legacy code

  • differential equation
  • virtual machine
  • architectural strategies
  • experimental prototypes
  • scalable scientific

  • irregular graphs
  • add explicit
  • evolution taxes
  • isv codes
  • genome project

  • taxes current
  • architecture using
  • clinical trials
  • coupled model
  • underlying technology


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