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The Opportunities and Challenges of Computational Science
and Engineering [
PDF]
Douglass Post
Chief Scientist
United States Department of Defense
High Performance Computing Modernization Program
Arlington, VA 22201
The next generation of computers will offer society unprecedented opportunities to solve problems in basic and applied science and engineering of strategic importance. The application areas cover almost all of science and engineering and even the "social sciences". Within ten years we will have access not only to multi-petaflop supercomputers, but also to multi-teraflop desktops and small clusters.
Developing applications to exploit this exponential growth in computing power is the key challenge. Each application is largely unique. Developing major applications of the required complexity has taken large teams (10 to 30 staff) many years (10 or more). It's even more difficult today. Massive parallelization has resulted in highly complex computer platforms and increased the challenge of developing applications. The challenges include integrating complex scientific phenomena, managing and coordinating multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary project teams, organizing the code development process while maintaining adequate flexibility and agility, meeting the requirements of the laws of nature and groups of production users, ensuring adequate verification and validation, and developing and using software development tools for these complex platforms. There's lots of support for developing more powerful computers, but little (or none) for addressing the code development challenges.
This has created an opportunity for national and international collaboration to develop and deploy code development and production tools for these new computers. The development tools include improved languages and parallel programming models; software design tools; integrated development environments; profiling, optimization and memory management tools; debuggers; issue and bug tracking tools; verification and validation tools and methods; and collaboration tools. Improved production tools are needed for mesh generation; run management and data archiving; data analysis and assessment; run scheduling; and checkpoint restarting. The capability of these tools has not kept pace with the growing complexity of computers. The lack of good tools is crippling the development of the new applications to exploit the new generation of computers. Unfortunately the business model for tool development is weak or non-existent. Filling this need presents an opportunity for national and international collaboration among the government institutions across the globe. Unless this need is filled, we will not be able to fully exploit the opportunity that the next generation of computers offers society
Douglass E. Post has been developing and applying large-scale multi-physics simulations and leading technical projects for over 40 years. He is the Chief Scientist of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, manager of the CREATE Program, and a member of the senior technical staff of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the joint AIP/IEEE publication "Computing in Science and Engineering". Doug received a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University in 1975. He led the tokamak modeling group at Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1975 to 1993 and served as head of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Physics Project Unit (1988-1990), and head of ITER Joint Central Team In-vessel Physics Group (1993-1998). More recently, he was the A-X Associate Division Leader for Simulation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1998-2000) and the Deputy X-Division Leader for Simulation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (2001-2003). He has published over 230 refereed papers, conference papers and books on computational, experimental and theoretical physics with over 5200 citations. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Nuclear Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
