The US, Europe, Japan and China are racing to develop the next generation of supercomputers – exascale machines capable of 10 to the 18th power calculations a second – by 2020. But the barriers are daunting: the challenge is to change the paradigm of high-performance computing. The 2012 biennial high performance workshop, held in Cetraro, Italy in June 2012, focused on the challenges facing the computing research community to reach exascale performance in the next decade. This book presents papers from this workshop, arranged into four major topics: energy, scalability, new architectural concepts and programming of heterogeneous computing systems. Chapter 1 introduces the status of present supercomputers, which are still about two orders of magnitude separated from the exascale mark. Chapter 2 examines energy demands, a major limiting factor of today's fastest supercomputers; the quantum leap in performance required for exascale computing will require a shift in architectures and technology. In Chapter 3, scalable computer paradigms for dense linear algebra on massive heterogeneous systems are presented, and Chapter 4 discusses architectural concepts. Finally, Chapter 5 addresses the programming of heterogeneous systems. This book will be of interest to all those wishing to understand how the development of modern supercomputers is set to advance in the next decade.

Single processing units have now reached a point where further major improvements in their performance are restricted by their physical limitations. This is causing a slowing down in advances at the same time as new scientific challenges are demanding exascale speed. This has meant that parallel processing has become key to High Performance Computing (HPC). This book contains the proceedings of the 14th biennial ParCo conference, ParCo2011, held in Ghent, Belgium. The ParCo conferences have traditionally concentrated on three main themes: Algorithms, Architectures and Applications. Nowadays though, the focus has shifted from traditional multiprocessor topologies to heterogeneous and manycores, incorporating standard CPUs, GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These platforms are, at a higher abstraction level, integrated in clusters, grids and clouds. The papers presented here reflect this change of focus. New architectures, programming tools and techniques are also explored, and the need for exascale hardware and software was also discussed in the industrial session of the conference.This book will be of interest to all those interested in parallel computing today, and progress towards the exascale computing of tomorrow.

HPC, Big Data, AI Convergence Towards Exascale provides an updated vision on the most advanced computing, storage, and interconnection technologies, that are at basis of convergence among the HPC, Cloud, Big Data, and artificial intelligence (AI) domains. Through the presentation of the solutions devised within recently founded H2020 European projects, this book provides an insight on challenges faced by integrating such technologies and in achieving performance and energy efficiency targets towards the exascale level. Emphasis is given to innovative ways of provisioning and managing resources, as well as monitoring their usage. Industrial and scientific use cases give to the reader practical examples of the needs for a cross-domain convergence. All the chapters in this book pave the road to new generation of technologies, support their development and, in addition, verify them on real-world problems. The readers will find this book useful because it provides an overview of currently available technologies that fit with the concept of unified Cloud-HPC-Big Data-AI applications and presents examples of their actual use in scientific and industrial applications.

Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale, Volume 3 focuses on the ecosystems surrounding the world’s leading centers for high performance computing (HPC). It covers many of the important factors involved in each ecosystem: computer architectures, software, applications, facilities, and sponsors. This third volume will be a continuation of the two previous volumes, and will include other HPC ecosystems using the same chapter outline: description of a flagship system, major application workloads, facilities, and sponsors. Features: Describes many prominent, international systems in HPC from 2015 through 2017 including each system’s hardware and software architecture Covers facilities for each system including power and cooling Presents application workloads for each site Discusses historic and projected trends in technology and applications Includes contributions from leading experts Designed for researchers and students in high performance computing, computational science, and related areas, this book provides a valuable guide to the state-of-the art research, trends, and resources in the world of HPC.

Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale focuses on the ecosystems surrounding the world’s leading centers for high performance computing (HPC). It covers many of the important factors involved in each ecosystem: computer architectures, software, applications, facilities, and sponsors. The first part of the book examines significant trends in HPC systems, including computer architectures, applications, performance, and software. It discusses the growth from terascale to petascale computing and the influence of the TOP500 and Green500 lists. The second part of the book provides a comprehensive overview of 18 HPC ecosystems from around the world. Each chapter in this section describes programmatic motivation for HPC and their important applications; a flagship HPC system overview covering computer architecture, system software, programming systems, storage, visualization, and analytics support; and an overview of their data center/facility. The last part of the book addresses the role of clouds and grids in HPC, including chapters on the Magellan, FutureGrid, and LLGrid projects. With contributions from top researchers directly involved in designing, deploying, and using these supercomputing systems, this book captures a global picture of the state of the art in HPC.

From the Foreword: "The authors of the chapters in this book are the pioneers who will explore the exascale frontier. The path forward will not be easy... These authors, along with their colleagues who will produce these powerful computer systems will, with dedication and determination, overcome the scalability problem, discover the new algorithms needed to achieve exascale performance for the broad range of applications that they represent, and create the new tools needed to support the development of scalable and portable science and engineering applications. Although the focus is on exascale computers, the benefits will permeate all of science and engineering because the technologies developed for the exascale computers of tomorrow will also power the petascale servers and terascale workstations of tomorrow. These affordable computing capabilities will empower scientists and engineers everywhere." — Thom H. Dunning, Jr., Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA "This comprehensive summary of applications targeting Exascale at the three DoE labs is a must read." — Rio Yokota, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan "Numerical simulation is now a need in many fields of science, technology, and industry. The complexity of the simulated systems coupled with the massive use of data makes HPC essential to move towards predictive simulations. Advances in computer architecture have so far permitted scientific advances, but at the cost of continually adapting algorithms and applications. The next technological breakthroughs force us to rethink the applications by taking energy consumption into account. These profound modifications require not only anticipation and sharing but also a paradigm shift in application design to ensure the sustainability of developments by guaranteeing a certain independence of the applications to the profound modifications of the architectures: it is the passage from optimal performance to the portability of performance. It is the challenge of this book to demonstrate by example the approach that one can adopt for the development of applications offering performance portability in spite of the profound changes of the computing architectures." — Christophe Calvin, CEA, Fundamental Research Division, Saclay, France "Three editors, one from each of the High Performance Computer Centers at Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, have compiled a very useful set of chapters aimed at describing software developments for the next generation exa-scale computers. Such a book is needed for scientists and engineers to see where the field is going and how they will be able to exploit such architectures for their own work. The book will also benefit students as it provides insights into how to develop software for such computer architectures. Overall, this book fills an important need in showing how to design and implement algorithms for exa-scale architectures which are heterogeneous and have unique memory systems. The book discusses issues with developing user codes for these architectures and how to address these issues including actual coding examples.’ — Dr. David A. Dixon, Robert Ramsay Chair, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA

As predicted by Gordon E. Moore in 1965, the performance of computer processors increased at an exponential rate. Nevertheless, the increases in computing speeds of single processor machines were eventually curtailed by physical constraints. This led to the development of parallel computing, and whilst progress has been made in this field, the complexities of parallel algorithm design, the deficiencies of the available software development tools and the complexity of scheduling tasks over thousands and even millions of processing nodes represent a major challenge to the construction and use of more powerful parallel systems. This book presents the proceedings of the biennial International Conference on Parallel Computing (ParCo2015), held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in September 2015. Topics covered include computer architecture and performance, programming models and methods, as well as applications. The book also includes two invited talks and a number of mini-symposia. Exascale computing holds enormous promise in terms of increasing scientific knowledge acquisition and thus contributing to the future well-being and prosperity of mankind. A number of innovative approaches to the development and use of future high-performance and high-throughput systems are to be found in this book, which will be of interest to all those whose work involves the handling and processing of large amounts of data.

HPC is used to solve a number of complex questions in computational and data-intensive sciences. These questions include the simulation and modeling of physical phenomena, such as climate change, energy production, drug design, global security, and materials design; the analysis of large data sets such as those in genome sequencing, astronomical observation, and cybersecurity; and the intricate design of engineered products, such as airplanes and automobiles. This second volume of Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale continues to document international HPC ecosystems, including the sponsors and sites that host them. Each chapter is punctuated with a site's flagship system and: Presents highlights of applications, workloads, and benchmarks Describes hardware architectures, system software, and programming systems Explores storage, visualization, and analytics Examines the data center/facility as well as system statistics Featuring pictures of buildings and systems in production, floorplans, and many block diagrams and charts to illustrate system design and performance, Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale, Volume Two delivers a detailed snapshot of the rich history of practice in modern HPC. This book provides a valuable reference for researchers in HPC and computational science.

For the last four decades, parallel computing platforms have increasingly formed the basis for the development of high performance systems primarily aimed at the solution of intensive computing problems, and the application of parallel computing systems has also become a major factor in furthering scientific research. But such systems also offer the possibility of solving the problems encountered in the processing of large-scale scientific data sets, as well as in the analysis of Big Data in the fields of medicine, social media, marketing, economics etc. This book presents papers from the International Research Workshop on Advanced High Performance Computing Systems, held in Cetraro, Italy, in July 2016. The workshop covered a wide range of topics and new developments related to the solution of intensive and large-scale computing problems, and the contributions included in this volume cover aspects of the evolution of parallel platforms and highlight some of the problems encountered with the development of ever more powerful computing systems. The importance of future large-scale data science applications is also discussed. The book will be of particular interest to all those involved in the development or application of parallel computing systems.