HPC at Exascale: Scenarios, Software challenges and Research opportunities.

Abstract:

The next frontier of the HPC community is Exascale computing. Studies have started at several key players of HPC. These studies reveal potential scenarios for hardware and software raising many open questions. The community has launched several road mapping initiatives, research laboratories, academic/military funding programs to organize research and development toward solving critical issues with realistic solutions. As the community moves forward and candidate architectures get more defined, the technical issues on software and applications get more challenging. In this talk, I will present where the community is in this endeavor to Exascale computing, what are the main scenarios envisioned for Exascale architectures, what are the consequences on software. We will in particular focus on fault tolerance since this problem is identified as one of the main issues to solve before Exascale and is linked to two other critical issues that are scalability&locality and the reduction of energy consumption.

Biography:

Franck Cappello holds a Senior Researcher position at INRIA and a visiting research professor position at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the co-director with Marc Snir of the INRIA-Illinois Joint-Laboratory on PetaScale Computing (http://jointlab.ncsa.illinois.edu/). He is member of the executive committee of IESP (International Exascale Software Project : http://www.exascale.org) and chair of the "system software ecosystem" for EESI (European Exascale Software Initiative). He has been involved in many Exascale preparation workshops. Before 2009, he led the Grid5000 project, a nationwide computer science platform for research in large scale distributed systems used by hundreds of researchers. He is editorial board member of the international Journal on Grid Computing, Journal of Grid and Utility Computing and Journal of Cluster Computing. He is a steering committee member of IEEE HPDC and IEEE/ACM CCGRID. He is the Program chair of HiPC 2010, Technical paper co-chair of SC2010, Program co-Chair of IEEE CCGRID’2009 and was the General Chair of IEEE HPDC’2006.