About SPPEXA
The Priority Programme "Software for Exascale Computing" (SPPEXA) addresses fundamental research on the various aspects of HPC software, which is particularly urgent against the background that we are currently entering the era of ubiquitous massive parallelism. This massive parallelism only, subsumed to the notion of many-core processors and their assembly to systems beyond 107 processing units, will smooth the way for extreme computing up to exascale, i.e. computations with 1018 floating point operations per second and beyond, and the insight resulting from those simulations. Mastering the various challenges related to this paradigm shift from sequential or just moderately parallel to massively parallel processing will be the key to any future capability computing application at exascale, but it will also be crucial for learning how to effectively and efficiently deal with commodity systems of the day after tomorrow for smaller-scale or capacity computing tasks - and it is the overall scientific objective of SPPEXA. To this end, SPPEXA re-connects several relevant sub-fields of computer science with the needs of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) and High-Performance Computing (HPC). SPPEXA provides the framework for a much closer cooperation and a much more co-design-driven approach - instead of a merely service-driven collaboration of groups focusing on fundamental HPC methodology (computer science or mathematics) on the one hand with those working on science applications and providing the large codes (science and engineering) on the other hand. Topically, SPPEXA will drive research towards extreme-scale computing in six areas or research directions:
- computational algorithms,
- system software,
- application software,
- data management and exploration,
- programming,
- software tools.
Hardware peak performance is ever increasing, exascale systems are currently predicted for around 2024, and insight is growing world-wide that a "racks without brains" strategy will not allow the science communities to exploit the huge potential of the computational approach in a massively parallel world. Against this background, SPPEXA provides an ideal framework for bundling research activities nation-wide and enabling the participating groups to significantly advance the state of the art in HPC software technology at an international scale.