CACR Seminar “Software Challenges for Extreme Scale Systems”

Thursday, October 18, 2012
Annenberg 105
4PM

“Software Challenges for Extreme Scale Systems”
Vivek Sarkar, E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, Rice University

ABSTRACT:

It is widely recognized that  computer systems anticipated in the
2020 timeframe will be qualitatively different from current
and past computer systems.  Specifically, they will be built using
homogeneous and heterogeneous many-core processors with 100’s of
cores per chip, their performance will be driven by parallelism
(million-way parallelism just for a departmental server), and
constrained by energy and data movement.  They will also be subject to
frequent faults and failures.  Unlike previous generations of hardware
evolution, these Extreme Scale systems will have a profound impact on
future software.  The software challenges are further compounded by
the need to support new workloads and application domains
that have traditionally not had to worry about large scales of
parallelism in the past.

The challenges across the entire software stack for Extreme Scale
systems are driven by programmability and performance requirements,
and impose new requirements on programming models, languages, compilers, and runtime systems.
We focus on the critical role played by the runtime
system in enabling programmability in upper layers of the software
stack that interface with the programmer, and in enabling performance
in lower levels of the software stack that interface with the
hardware.  Examples of key runtime primitives will be drawn from early
experiences in the Habanero Multicore Software Research project
(http://habanero.rice.edu) which targets a wide range of homogeneous
and heterogeneous manycore processors.  On the programmability front,
the runtime primitives are shown to support important semantic guarantees
for different classes of programs.  On the performance front, we show how general structures for
task creation, synchronization, and termination can be implemented in a scalable manner
on manycore processor testbeds that are representative of the challenges
that we will face in future Extreme Scale processors.

BIO:

Vivek Sarkar conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel
software including programming languages, program analysis, compiler
optimizations and runtimes for parallel and high performance computer
systems.  He currently leads the Habanero Multicore Software Research
project at Rice University, and serves as Associate Director of the
NSF Expeditions project on the Center for Domain-Specific Computing.
Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Vivek was Senior Manager of
Programming Technologies at IBM Research.  His responsibilities at IBM
included leading IBM’s research efforts in programming model, tools,
and productivity in the PERCS project during 2002- 2007 as part of the
DARPA High Productivity Computing System program.  His past projects
include the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual
Machine for the Java language, the MIT RAW multicore project, the ASTI
optimizer used in IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, the PTRAN
automatic parallelization system, and profile-directed partitioning
and scheduling of Sisal programs.  Vivek holds a B.Tech. degree from
the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from
University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
He became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the
E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was
inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008.  Vivek has been serving as a member
of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing
Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009.