NCSA to host petascale BOF at SC07

NCSA will host a birds-of-a-feather session on "Developing Applications for Petascale Computers" at SC07 in Reno. This session will be held 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 13 in rooms A2 / A5. The discussion will be led by Thom Dunning, Dan Reed (Renaissance Computing Institute) and Ed Seidel (Louisiana State University). As applications are scaled to machines with hundreds of thousands of cores, multiple issues arise to hinder achieving the desired performance level. Identifying and responding to the major issues from the point of view of the applications scientist is essential to the success of petascale systems. Areas in which applications capabilities will need to be developed or enhanced include:

• Application algorithms: libraries, programming techniques.
• Performance analysis and optimization: identifying performance bottlenecks and projecting future performance, and optimizing and measuring performance.
• Modeling and projection: application analysis and developing models of performance to explain current or future performance.
• Application simulation: execution-driven, trace-driven, whole system, and network simulations.

Each of these issues has multiple facets and numerous subtleties. In this BOF, the goal is to draw out a high level view of the expectations of the applications communities within the context of near-term and long-term plans for petascale computing systems.