The Path to Delivering Programable Exascale Systems

The trends in hardware architecture are paving the road towards Exascale. However, these trends are also increasing the complexity of design and development of the software developer environment that is deployed on modern supercomputers. Moreover, the scale and complexity of high-end systems creates a new set of challenges for application developers. Computational scientists are facing system characteristics that will significantly impact the programmability and scalability of applications. In order to address these issues, software architects need to take a holistic view of the entire system and deliver a high-level programming environment that can help maximize programmability, while not losing sight of performance portability. In this talk, I will discuss the current trends in computer architecture and their implications in application development and will present Cray's high level parallel programming environment for performance and programmability on current and future supercomputers. I will also discuss some of the challenges and open research problems that need to be addressed in order to build a software developer environment for extreme-scale systems that helps users solve multi-disciplinary and multi-scale problems with high levels of performance, programmability, and scalability.