Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Production quality Ecosystem for Programming and Executing eXtreme-scale Applications (EPEXA)

来自三个机构的研究人员团队将合作设计和开发一个软件框架，为当前编程范例支持不足的不规则和动态计算实现高性能方法。该框架名为EPEXA(编程和执行极端应用程序的生态系统)，将创建一个生产质量、通用、社区支持的开源软件生态系统，以应对现代高性能计算机上高级科学应用程序的程序员生产力和可移植性能的双重挑战。利用科学驱动的联合设计，该团队将把一种新编程模型的成功研究原型转化为生产，并加速使用这些工具进行研究的计算机科学家和领域科学家社区的增长。该项目在成功的原则证明和具有足够质量、性能和社区支持的实现之间架起了所谓的“死亡之谷”，以激励应用科学家和其他研究人员采用这些工具并将自己的努力投资于社区。除了框架开发工作外，该项目还包括对博士后学者、研究生和本科生的培训以及教育、推广和科学界的参与活动。具体地说，新的强大的数据流编程模型和相关的并行运行时直接解决了科学家在尝试使用快速变化的计算机技术(包括当前的大规模并行、混合和多核系统)时面临的多重挑战。数据密集型和计算密集型应用程序在一定程度上都是通过通用编程模型和面向多个后端或运行时系统的能力来实现的。还允许领域科学家为共享和分布式内存计算机创建新的领域特定语言(DSL)。EPEXA致力于设计和开发最先进的软件环境，利用国家科学基金会在网络基础设施方面的投资，实现跨所有学科的科学发现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A team of researchers from three institutions will work collaboratively to design and develop a software framework that implements high-performance methods for irregular and dynamic computations that are poorly supported by current programming paradigms. The framework, titled EPEXA (Ecosystem for Programming and Executing eXtreme Applications), will create a production-quality, general-purpose, community-supported, open-source software ecosystem that attacks the twin challenges of programmer productivity and portable performance for advanced scientific applications on modern high-performance computers. Employing science-driven co-design, the team will transition into production a successful research prototype of a new programming model and accelerate the growth of the community of computer scientists and domain scientists employing these tools for their research. The project bridges the so-called "valley of death" between successful proofs of principle to an implementation with enough quality, performance, and community support to motivate application scientists and other researchers to adopt the tools and invest their own effort into the community. In addition to work on the framework development, the project includes training of postdoctoral scholars, graduate and undergraduate students as well as education, outreach and scientific community engagement activities.Specifically, the new powerful data-flow programming model and associated parallel runtime directly address multiple challenges faced by scientists as they attempt to employ rapidly changing computer technologies including current massively-parallel, hybrid, and many-core systems. Both data-intensive and compute-intensive applications are enabled in part by the general programming model and through the ability to target multiple backends or runtime systems. Also enabled is the creation by domain scientists of new domain-specific languages (DSLs) for both shared and distributed-memory computers. EPEXA contributes to the design and development of state-of-the-art software environments that leverage the National Science Foundation's investments in cyberinfrastructure to enable scientific discovery across all disciplines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.