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The next generation of supercomputers will break the exascale barrier. Soon we will have systems capable of at least one quintillion (billion billion) floating-point operations per second (1018 FLOPS). Tremendous amounts of work have been invested into identifying and overcoming the challenges of the exascale era. In this work, we present an overview of these efforts and provide insight into the important trends, developments, and exciting research opportunities in exascale computing. We use a three-stage approach in whichwe (1) discuss various exascale landmark studies, (2) use data-driven techniques to analyze the large collection of related literature, and (3) discuss eight research areas in depth based on influential articles. Overall, we observe that great advancements have been made in tackling the two primary exascale challenges: energy efficiency and fault tolerance. However, as we look forward, we still foresee two major concerns: the lack of suitable programming tools and the growing gap between processor performance and data bandwidth (i.e., memory, storage, networks). Although we will certainly reach exascale soon, without additional research, these issues could potentially limit the applicability of exascale computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present DMNetwork, a high-level package included in the PETSc library for the simulation of multiphysics phenomena over large-scale networked systems. The library aims at applications that have networked structures such as those in electrical, gas, and water distribution systems. DMNetwork provides data and topology management, parallelization for multiphysics systems over a network, and hierarchical and composable solvers to exploit the problem structure. DMNetwork eases the simulation development cycle by providing the necessary infrastructure through simple abstractions to define and query the network components. This article presents the design of DMNetwork, illustrates its user interface, and demonstrates its ability to solve multiphysics systems, such as an electric circuit, a network of power grid and water subnetworks, and transient hydraulic systems over large networks with more than 2 billion variables on extreme-scale computers using up to 30,000 processors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past four years, the Big Data and Exascale Computing (BDEC) project organized a series of five international workshops that aimed to explore the ways in which the new forms of data-centric discovery introduced by the ongoing revolution in high-end data analysis (HDA) might be integrated with the established, simulation-centric paradigm of the high-performance computing (HPC) community. Based on those meetings, we argue that the rapid proliferation of digital data generators, the unprecedented growth in the volume and diversity of the data they generate, and the intense evolution of the methods for analyzing and using that data are radically reshaping the landscape of scientific computing. The most critical problems involve the logistics of wide-area, multistage workflows that will move back and forth across the computing continuum, between the multitude of distributed sensors, instruments and other devices at the networks edge, and the centralized resources of commercial clouds and HPC centers. We suggest that the prospects for the future integration of technological infrastructures and research ecosystems need to be considered at three different levels. First, we discuss the convergence of research applications and workflows that establish a research paradigm that combines both HPC and HDA, where ongoing progress is already motivating efforts at the other two levels. Second, we offer an account of some of the problems involved with creating a converged infrastructure for peripheral environments, that is, a shared infrastructure that can be deployed throughout the network in a scalable manner to meet the highly diverse requirements for processing, communication, and buffering/storage of massive data workflows of many different scientific domains. Third, we focus on some opportunities for software ecosystem convergence in big, logically centralized facilities that execute large-scale simulations and models and/or perform large-scale data analytics. We close by offering some conclusions and recommendations for future investment and policy review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today’s computational, experimental, and observational sciences rely on computations that involve many related tasks. The success of a scientific mission often hinges on the computer automation of these workflows. In April 2015, the US Department of Energy (DOE) invited a diverse group of domain and computer scientists from national laboratories supported by the Office of Science, the National Nuclear Security Administration, from industry, and from academia to review the workflow requirements of DOE’s science and national security missions, to assess the current state of the art in science workflows, to understand the impact of emerging extreme-scale computing systems on those workflows, and to develop requirements for automated workflow management in future and existing environments. This article is a summary of the opinions of over 50 leading researchers attending this workshop. We highlight use cases, computing systems, workflow needs and conclude by summarizing the remaining challenges this community sees that inhibit large-scale scientific workflows from becoming a mainstream tool for extreme-scale science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present here a report produced by a workshop on ‘Addressing failures in exascale computing’ held in Park City, Utah, 4–11 August 2012. The charter of this workshop was to establish a common taxonomy about resilience across all the levels in a computing system, discuss existing knowledge on resilience across the various hardware and software layers of an exascale system, and build on those results, examining potential solutions from both a hardware and software perspective and focusing on a combined approach.The workshop brought together participants with expertise in applications, system software, and hardware; they came from industry, government, and academia, and their interests ranged from theory to implementation. The combination allowed broad and comprehensive discussions and led to this document, which summarizes and builds on those discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exascale systems are the next frontier in high-performance computing and are expected to deliver a performance of the order of 1018 operations per second using massive multicore processors. Very large- and extreme-scale parallel systems pose critical algorithmic challenges, especially related to concurrency, locality and the need to avoid global communication patterns. This work investigates a novel protocol for dynamic group communication that can be used to remove the global communication requirement and to reduce the communication cost in parallel formulations of iterative data mining algorithms. The protocol is used to provide a communication-efficient parallel formulation of the k-means algorithm for cluster analysis. The approach is based on a collective communication operation for dynamic groups of processes and exploits non-uniform data distributions. Non-uniform data distributions can be either found in real-world distributed applications or induced by means of multidimensional binary search trees. The analysis of the proposed dynamic group communication protocol has shown that it does not introduce significant communication overhead. The parallel clustering algorithm has also been extended to accommodate an approximation error, which allows a further reduction of the communication costs. The effectiveness of the exact and approximate methods has been tested in a parallel computing system with 64 processors and in simulations with 1024 processing elements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]