The ECP Software Technology Update Report is Available
The US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has published a project overview and update report focused on the Software Technology efforts. The Application Development update report was released in September 2019. The third report in the series, an update on ECP’s Hardware and Integration activities, will be released in December 2019.
ECP’s work in software technology represents the key bridge between exascale systems and the scientists developing applications that will run on those platforms. ECP offers a unique opportunity to build a coherent set of software—referred to as the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack, E4S—that will enable application developers to maximize their ability to write highly efficient and portable applications targeting multiple exascale architectures.
The capabilities of E4S will aid in unlocking the latent scientific and engineering insights available from the unprecedented data produced by the applications running on exascale systems. E4S will provide a complete analysis workflow that includes new technology to collect, reduce, organize, curate, and analyze the data into actionable decisions at exascale.
Accomplishing all that the ECP is charged to do requires approaching scientific computing in a holistic manner that encompasses the entire workflow—from identification of a challenge to designing and developing algorithms, tuning an application and performing high-fidelity simulations, applying uncertainty quantification, and analyzing and visualizing the results. The ECP software stack aims to address all those needs by extending current technologies to exascale where possible.
The process of developing the software stack entails performing the research required to conceive of new approaches necessary to address unique problems where current approaches will not suffice, and by packaging and delivering high-quality and robust software products for exascale.
As of this report, the ECP Software Technology group is managing the development and testing of capabilities that contribute to 70 unique software products spanning programming models and run times, math libraries, data, and visualization. In addition to providing the needed capabilities for ECP applications, the E4S software stack will enable many other applications to realize the performance potential of emerging high-performance computing (HPC) architectures. As a collection of open-source, reusable software components, E4S is available to the broader HPC community, including other US agencies and industry.
