Applications Motivation of a PetaFLOPSComputer Program

We show in Table 4.1 a wide set of applications, which are potential uses of PetaFLOPS machines. We divide these into three major areas:

1. Large Scale Simulations (grand challenges) extrapolated from TeraFLOPS machines. Two sub-classes can be separated.
   • Problem size naturally increases (an example is turbulence where more grid points are needed to increase spatial resolution),
   • Problem size is unchanged but there is a need to increase simulated time (an example is protein dynamics with 10,000 atoms and one needs to achieve millisecond simulated time with second basic time step).
2. Data Intensive Applications that rely on petabyte exabyte of primary and secondary storage.
3. Novel Applications.

1. Our working group did not have the broad expertise to establish the PetaFLOPS motivation in full detail.
2. We can give examples, as described in Section 4.4. However, we recommend that our work be refined by appropriate ``domain expert groups.''
3. We can note generally that computation is and will be increasingly important in economy, society, education, academic, and U.S. needs to be in the lead in the continuing future-just as it is now with HPCC.
4. One cannot predict the critical applications 10-20 years from now. New national problems will arise, and surely HPCC will be critical in many of them. Most of our exemplars will be important, if not the most important PetaFLOPS scale problems.
5. Many PetaFLOPS scale applications will involve integration of disparate activities and will require changes in current modus operandi. For instance, the NII (and applications such as interactive television) will impact society in a nontrivial way. Agile manufacturing requires database (CAD) simulation, design, analysis, manufacturing, and marketing to be integrated. PetaFLOPS computing enables this, but the multidisciplinary character has implications for hardware, software, and hardest of all, the structure of manufacturing companies.
6. We recommend a program to investigate new algorithms needed by PetaFLOPS scale applications and the special architectural features of PetaFLOPS machines. This is expanded in Section 4.5.
7. Historically new algorithms, new difficulties, and indeed new applications have been identified as one increases power of computer-even by a ``mere'' factor of 10. This is likely to occur in ``all'' application areas. Today's typical achieved maximum performance is a GigaFLOPS. Thus, we expect a set of revolutions or ``just'' minirevolutions as we extrapolate a factor of to PetaFLOPS performance.