System Software for Scalable Applications
Bill Gropp, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Usage Details
Ewing (Rusty) Lusk, Rajeev Thakur, Bill Gropp, Robert Latham, Kamil Iskra, Pavan Balaji, Silvio Rizzi, Darius Buntinas, Dave Goodell, Kalyana Chadalavada, James Dinan, Palden Lama, Yan Li, Correa Carvalho Ralf Gunter, Antonio Pena Monferrer, Huiwei Lu, Min SiHigh-end computing systems, such as Blue Waters, consist of hundreds of thousands of processors, terabytes of memory, exotic high-speed networks, and petabytes of storage. Modern architectures are increasingly relying on hardware sharing that includes shared caches, shared memory and memory management devices, and shared network infrastructure. Multi-core architectures, simultaneous multi-threading capable processors and flat torus-like network architectures are some examples of the hardware sharing that is becoming increasingly prevalent today.
As hardware complexity sky-rockets, it is not easy for applications to take complete advantage of the available system resources and avoid potential bottlenecks. The purpose of this project is to improve the performance and productivity of key system software components on petascale platforms such as Blue Waters by studying four classes of system software: message passing libraries, parallel I/O, data visualization, and operating system. The team will use time on Blue Waters to understand and solve scalability and performance issues that show up on large-scale complex systems. A computational chemistry application (NWChem) and a climate modeling application (CCSM) will be used to study and validate the performance and scalability of our system software components.
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~wgropp/projects/index.html
