Discussion of Software Technology Areas

Software technology is a broad, diverse area. This section discusses the major subcategories of this technology area and outlines the current status, major trends, opportunities, and barriers to progress in each. First, we state some basic assumptions and beliefs:

• There are substantial software technology problems that have not been solved satisfactorily even on the scale of TeraFLOPS, let alone PetaFLOPS. In general, we will focus on trends and problems that need attention, without regard to where in the TeraFLOPS-PetaFLOPS range the problems become severe. Indeed, as discussed above, many of these problems are already severe and will need attention even in the TeraFLOPS range.
• As discussed above, some PetaFLOPS applications can be expected to be the lineal descendants of today's HPC scientific computations, while others will be new to the HPC sphere. Many of these latter applications will emphasize computing and information retrieval on massive data sets. Even among the scientific computations, we expect to see a shift toward a greater emphasis on computations whose structure evolves dynamically at run time (such as modern N-body simulation algorithms) and/or which have nested levels of parallelism, which are not handled well by implementation strategies based on statically computed mapping and resource-allocation decisions. Data-intensive applications are likely to exhibit these characteristics to an even greater extent, leading to new demands on software technology.

• Programming Languages and Models
• Programming Technology
• Input/Output
• Resource Management/Scheduling
• The Training and Experience Base of ScientificProgram Developers