Next Generation Software: Adaptive, Performance-Portable Software for Next-Generation and Immersive Applications

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

EIA-9975011Princeton UniversityKai LiNext Generation Software: Adaptive, Performance-Portable Software for Next-Generation and Immersive ApplicationsA new generation of applications is becoming very important for high-performance computing, including collaborative design, interactive walkthroughs and large data visualization, and telepresence. They require tremendous resources including CPU, memory, storage, and audio/visual devices, and they have substantially different characteristics, performance goals and system interactions than traditional scientific applications. For example, they have extremely irregular and unpredictable data access needs and workload distributions, they interact more dynamically and with many more types of input/output sensors and devices, they involve dynamic user interaction and steering, and their goal is to deliver the best possible quality at a fixed output refresh rate rather than a solution of fixed quality in the minimum possible time. As computer architectures become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop such applications to achieve the desired performance. Three properties are critical: (i) high performance for rich interactive behavior, (ii) adaptability and isolation in all layers (i.e. the complexity, and unpredictability demand that each layer of application or system software must adapt to the layers above and below it-through performance modeling and through runtime feedback and adaptation-and should try to shield the neighboring layers from each other's complexity), and (iii) performance portability across component upgrades and across the different major types of platforms that may be used in such environments. Our goal is to develop the software building blocks, runtime systems and design methodologies to assist such application development.