CAREER: Autotuning Foundations for Exascale Computing

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this research is to discover novel foundational principles for developing highly-efficient and reliable software that can achieve sustainable performance on the exascale computing platforms expected by 2020. Such platforms will deliver three orders of magnitude beyond today?s systems; harnessing this raw computational power could revolutionize our modeling and understanding of critical phenomena in areas like climate modeling, energy, medicine, sustainability, cosmology, engineering design, and massive-scale data analytics. Yet, developing software for exascale systems is a tremendous challenge because the hardware is complex and it is not believed that the most productive ?high-level? software development environments (e.g., programming languages and libraries) will be able to effectively exploit these exascale systems. The investigator aims to address this challenge by using automated tuning (autotuning) to eliminate the low performance traditionally associated with high-level programming models. This research (a) develops new model-driven frameworks for tuning parallel algorithms and data structures, going beyond existing techniques that focus on low-level code tuning; and (b) studies autotuning for programs expressed in high-level programming models, with the aim of eliminating the performance gap. Concomitant with this research, the PI will create a new practicum course: The HPC Garage. The HPC Garage physically co-locates interdisciplinary teams in a social collaborative lab space; the teams engage in a year-long competition, called the XD Prize, to develop highly scalable algorithms and software for NSF TeraGrid?s next-generation XD facilities. The HPC Garage also hosts summer interns in Georgia Tech?s Computing Research Undergraduate Intern Summer Experience (CRUISE) program, whose mission is to encourage students, especially those from underrepresented groups, to pursue graduate degrees in computing.