SPP 1648: Software for Exascale Computing

Basic data for this project

Description

Today, simulation in its broadest sense - i.e. from mathematical modelling to (visual) data exploration and validation - is generally considered the third path to insight in most fields of science and engineering, complementing theory and experiment and sometimes even allowing for first results at all (if experiments are too costly, time-consuming or even impossible). Hence, the respective young and trans-disciplinary field of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) has become a key technology for science and industry. Despite the fact that, of course, not all kinds of simulation involve large-scale computations on high-end systems, High-Performance Computing (HPC) is the enabling technology for CSE. The Priority Programme addresses fundamental research on the various aspects of HPC software, which is particularly urgent against the background that we are currently entering the era of ubiquitous massive parallelism. This massive parallelism only, subsumed to the notion of many-core processors and their assembly to systems beyond 108 processing units, will smooth the way for exascale computing, i.e. computations with 1018 floating point operations per second and beyond, and the insight resulting from those simulations. Mastering the various challenges related to this paradigm shift from sequential or just moderately parallel to massively parallel processing is the key to any future capability computing application at exascale, but it is also crucial for learning how to effectively and efficiently deal with commodity systems of the day after tomorrow for smaller-scale or capacity computing tasks. Hardware peak performance is ever increasing and insight is growing world-wide that a "racks without brains" strategy will not allow the science communities to exploit the huge potential of the computational approach in a massively parallel world. Against this background, the Priority Programme - the first initiative of this topic and kind in Germany - provides a framework for bundling research activities nation-wide and enabling the participating groups to significantly advance the state of the art in software technology for HPC at an international scale.