Algorithmic requirements for extreme scale simulation
ABSTRACT:
Diverging exponentials in computer hardware subsystem performance require rethinking of models and reimplementation of algorithms in scientific and engineering simulation. Much mathematics and software appears to be missing if emerging hardware is to be used near its potential, since our existing code base has been assembled with a premium on squeezing out flops and improving the execution rate of those that remain. Instead, for reasons of energy efficiency and system acquisition cost, we must now focus on squeezing out synchronizations, memory footprint, and memory transfers. High concurrency and power-efficient design of the individual cores put opposite pressures on algorithms: respectively, they require greater data locality and greater freedom to redistribute data and computation. After decades of programming model stability, new models and new hardware must be developed simultaneously, a process called co-design. We extrapolate current trends and describe directions for exascale algorithms.
Biosketch:
David Keyes is the inaugural Dean of the Division of Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) at KAUST, an adjunct professor in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, and an affiliate of several laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy. Keyes graduated in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences from Princeton in 1978, earned a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984, and post-doc’ed in Computer Science at Yale. He works at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations. For his algorithmic influence in scientific simulation, Keyes was recognized as a Fellow of SIAM and of the AMS, with the Sidney Fernbach Award of the IEEE Computer Society, and with ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize. Author or editor of more than a dozen federal agency reports and member of several federal advisory committees on computational science and engineering and high performance computing, in 2011, Keyes received the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession.
Audience: Graduate students, researchers and staff
Location: Room 346, Visualization Lab
Date/Time: 02/07/13 at 1:30 pm - 02/07/13 at 2:30 pm
Category: Colloquium
Department: PICSciE
