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systems will likely pave the way for HPC centres that want to make use of the IBM systems in later years. Te US national labs are in a
unique position when it comes to the supercomputer market. Because they are in the vanguard of introducing new HPC machines using innovative hardware, they must also try new technologies and develop methods to scale and sustain their soſtware applications without the help of the larger community. Although the hardware suppliers
may always be competitors to each other, Steve Conway, research vice president, high performance computing at the IDC suggests that the increasing complexity of the new programming models will drive collaboration among HPC soſtware developers. Tey will rely on tools and knowledge provided by their colleagues to help drive soſtware scalability forward in HPC. Conway said: ‘Ecosystems are
going to be increasingly partnering with, or at least driven by, the open source community. Te Intel ecosystem will be very heavily dependent on Open Source. OpenPower, as the name implies, will be as well.’ He explained that this could
eventually produce a soſtware ecosystem whereby you would have specific vendors distributing their own versions ‘that are consistent with the open source versions’ but that add functionality through proprietary features or tools.
New technologies split the knowledge-base In this way, it seems increasingly likely that HPC developers will need to rely on a community-driven soſtware ecosystem for soſtware scalability in the future. However the number and size of these communities that can be supported by the HPC community is uncertain, as each new community effectively splits the knowledge-base into factions that support a specific technology platform. Tis was view espoused by Snell
who warned that while specialised hardware enables these increases in parallelism, they are also splitting
www.scientific-computing.com l
the code base between Intel and IBM, or those that use Nvidia GPUs and those who use Xeon Phi. But even this does not
account for all the hardware technologies available today. Newer technologies – one might think of ARM and FPGAs – and those without a sufficiently strong user-base behind them may find difficulty in supporting HPC users adapting to the changing landscape of soſtware programming at increased scale and parallelism. ‘Now you have to have
specialised tools for the various architectures. Ultimately they can be incredibly useful but without adoption they will fail,’ said Snell. Tis may bring smaller
technologies or groups of users together and drive them towards more established open source communities so that they can share from the knowledge provided by the developer community. Conway said: ‘Even with the
soſtware stack as it is, it is becoming too onerous for one single organisation to take that on. Te requirements are just exploding. You need more hands. You really need a whole community, in the order of Linux, to move things forward. ‘I think we are moving into a
world of reference architectures that correspond to specific ecosystems,’ Conway concluded. Te HPC community needs to
cultivate and maintain a skilled base of systems engineers, application developers, and soſtware scientists to drive the development of the next-generation tools that will be needed. But Conway stressed that one of the issues facing the HPC community was the size of the workforce and the level of its development. As the HPC market searches
for the optimal strategy to reach exascale, it is clear that the major roadblock to improving the performance of applications will be the scalability of soſtware, rather than the hardware configuration – or even the energy costs associated with running the system. l
@scwmagazine
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