Collaborative Research: System Software for Scalable Applications

该奖项促进了使用IBM正在开发并计划部署在伊利诺伊大学的大型新计算资源Blue Waters的科学研究。随着HPC系统中硬件复杂性的增加，应用程序很难充分利用可用的系统资源，避免潜在的瓶颈。该项目的目的是提高Blue Waters等千万亿级平台上关键系统软件组件的性能和生产率。来自芝加哥大学、伊利诺伊大学和阿贡国家实验室的研究人员建议研究四种不同类别的系统软件：消息传递库、并行I/O、数据可视化和操作系统。他们将在Blue Waters上使用计算化学应用程序(NWChem)和气候模拟应用程序(CCSM)来研究和验证其系统软件组件的性能和可扩展性。通过严格的实验、分析和设计周期，研究人员将极大地提高不仅在近期部署的系统的能力，而且在不久的将来提高所有达到可伸缩性极限的系统的能力。这项研究的好处将以修订后的系统软件的形式应用于各种大型千万亿级系统上的所有应用程序。结果将以教程、研讨会和会议演示以及研讨会的形式分发给系统供应商以及其他研究人员和学生。

This award facilitates scientific research using the large new computational resource named Blue Waters being developed by IBM and scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois. As hardware complexity increases in HPC systems, it is difficult for applications to take full 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. The researchers from University of Chicago, University of Illinois and Argonne National Laboratores propose to study four different classes of system software: message passing libraries, parallel I/O, data visualization, and operating system. They will use a computational chemistry application (NWChem) and a climate modeling application (CCSM) on Blue Waters to study and validate the performance and scalability of their system software components. Through rigorous experimentation, analysis, and design cycles, the researchers will dramatically improve the capabilities of not only systems being deployed in the near term, but of all systems pushing scalability limits in the near future.The benefits of this research will be available to all applications on a variety of large petascale systems in the form of revised system software. The results will be disseminated to system vendors as well as to other researchers and students in the form of tutorials, workshop and conference presentations, and seminars.