Berkeley Lab to Lead Three Exascale Software Projects, Support Four Others

November 10, 2016

Contact: Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov, 510-486-5849

Berkeley Lab computer scientists will lead three projects to develop software technologies for next-generation supercomputers under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Lab researchers will also provide support to four other ECP software projects.

The awards for the first year of funding total $34 million covering many components of the software stack for exascale systems, including programming models and runtime libraries, mathematical libraries and frameworks, tools, lower-level system software, data management and I/O, as well as in situ visualization and data analysis.

Exascale refers to computing systems at least 50 times faster than the nation’s most powerful supercomputers in use today.

Previously, Berkeley Lab researchers were named to lead five scientific application development projects and support six others and to lead one of four ECP co-design centers.

“These software development awards are a major first step toward developing a comprehensive and coherent software stack that will enable application developers to productively write highly parallel applications that can portably target diverse exascale architectures,” ECP Director Paul Messina said.

Berkeley Lab will lead these software projects:

Lightweight Communication and Global Address Space Support for Exascale Applications, with Scott Baden, head of the Computer Languages and Systems Software, as the principal investigator.
ExaHDF5: Delivering Efficient Parallel I/O on Exascale Computing Systems, with Suren Byna of the Scientific Data Management Group as the principal investigator.
Factorization Based Sparse Solvers and Preconditioners for Exascale, with Sherry Li, leader of the Scalable Solvers Group, as principal investigator.

Additionally, Berkeley Lab staff will contribute their expertise to these four projects:

Autotuning Compiler Technology for Cross-Architecture Transformation and Code Generation; Sam Williams of the Performance Algorithms and Research Group will participate.
Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit for the Exascale Computing Project: xSDK4ECP: Sherry Li of the Scalable Solvers Group will participate.
The ADIOS framework for Scientific Data on exascale systems: John Wu, leader of the Scientific Data Management Group will participate.
ECP ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis: Gunther Weber of the Data Analytics and Visualization Group will participate.

About Berkeley Lab

Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

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