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NERSC 3 Greenbook

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Critical Problems and Challenges

In spite of the achievements of the intervening three years since the first workshop, critical problems and challenges face today's HPC community which will require innovative, coordinated, and concerted efforts to address. Some key issues confronting HPC are:

1.

HPC application developers currently use almost none of the experimental research software that was designed to make their tasks easier. This software needs to be made far more reliable and portable before it can have the desired impact.

2.

Market penetration of HPC systems remains low with limited impact on national productivity and competitiveness.

3.

Software tools and applications exhibit poor portability. This is true not only between HPC systems but between SMP systems and across SMP to HPC systems as well.

4.

Lack of interoperability among evolving system software and tools precludes mutual leveraging of capabilities and severely limits benefits to applications developers as well as hinders cross platform portability. For example parallel compilers, debuggers, and performance analyzers on the same HPC platform but from independent sources are rarely capable of cooperation. At least in one sense, an notable exception is PVM which permits cross platform cooperation at the application level.

5.

Products of academic research in system software and tools are rarely commercialized, nor find wide use. Commercialization for many such tools may never be viable due to the small market but are nonetheless very useful and important to productivity and the advancement of HPCC.

6.

Management of scalable mass storage by HPC systems is poorly understood but a critical requirement and is the focus of some recent major collaborative research initiatives.

NERSC 3 Greenbook

Next: Driving Factors Up: Major Findings Previous: Progress and Accomplishment