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NERSC 3 Greenbook

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Introduction

The Second Pasadena Workshop on System Software and Tools for High Performance Computing Environments was conducted in January, 1995 and involved more than a hundred invited participants from industry, academia, and government. The objective of the workshop was to identify key factors critical to expanding the effectiveness and use of HPC systems through software technology and to propose actions by the community that would advance the quality of HPC programming environments. The assembly considered these issues from a number of perspectives including applications, parallel system software development, HPC architecture, relationship between research and commercial software, and several programming paradigms. Among the principal findings was that the HPC community is unable to sustain necessary R&D independently and must leverage industry investment in the rapidly emerging workstation clusters and symmetric multiprocessors. Of equal importance is the need for a common user interface across tools of equivalent type and shared interfaces between tools for interoperability. This paper presents the issues addressed and approach taken by the workshop, as well as the findings and recommendations generated by the workshop working groups.

The purpose of this second workshop on HPC software technology was to focus in on the very real problem of getting useful tools in the hands of applications developers to make scalable parallel computing systems an effective means of solving large-scale real-world computational problems. The first workshop established a baseline of understanding in this domain, providing broad coverage of the many components comprising HPC software technology and identifying specific critical and immediate needs. This second workshop extended these findings to include the enabling infrastructure for migrating experimental results and tools from the research community to production grade environments in support of the HPC applications developers. In so doing, this workshop involved hardware systems vendors, independent software vendors, researchers in system software, end-users, and governmental representatives responsible for technology policy and planning. During the course of the workshop, this expert body identified issues in the development, deployment, and use of HPC system software and tools and provided recommendations for resolving them.

NERSC 3 Greenbook

Next: Focus Questions Up: Findings of the Second Previous: Findings of the Second