Multicore Meets Petascale: The Catalyst for a Software Revolution

Kathy Yelick

Petascale systems will soon be available to the computational science community at multiple sites. These systems will represent a variety of architectural models, but with one common component, which is an increasing reliance on multicore technology as the building block for these machines. This shift towards on-chip parallelism brings into question the message-passing programming model that has dominated high-end programming for the past decade. In this talk I will describe some of the challenges that application scientists and algorithm developers will face in utilizing future Petascale systems. I will also present an alternative to message passing called Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages, describe some of the performance and scaling advantages, and also advocate a new notion of high end programming in which software is designed up-front to be adaptable to current and future systems.