Petascale science and engineering

The unprecedented computing power provided by the Blue Waters sustained-petascale system will allow U.S. scientists to make extraordinary leaps in knowledge and discovery—provided their scientific and engineering codes can take full advantage of the system's hundreds of thousands of processor cores and its high-performance interconnect and I/O subsystems.

To ensure those scientists' success, the Blue Waters team is helping teams around the country prepare their codes to run on Blue Waters and other computing systems like it. Work by these teams already span the gamut of research disciplines—complex biological systems, weather prediction, the forces influencing subatomic particles, material science, fluid turbulence modeling, and many others.

These multiyear collaborations include help porting and re-engineering existing applications. In some cases, the teams will build entirely new applications based on new programming models. Though Blue Waters doesn't come online until 2011, the first of these collaborations began in 2007.

This work is particularly challenging because Blue Waters will serve a broad range of scientific fields, because the projects that run on Blue Waters will change over time, and because the codes that run on Blue Waters will also run on other supercomputers. The new science and engineering applications will need to work on petascale and eventually exascale systems for years, if not decades, to come. And they need to move as effortlessly as possible to smaller contemporary systems.

With this in mind, the National Science Foundation and the Blue Waters team have established a set of interconnected efforts:

• Petascale Computing Resource Allocations. These awards from the National Science Foundation allow research teams to work closely with the Blue Waters project team in preparing their codes. Applications for these allocations are due once a year, throughout the life of the Blue Waters project. In order to receive an award of time on Blue Waters from the National Science Foundation once the system comes online, research teams must receive a pre-allocation through this process.
• Petascale Application Collaboration Teams. These collaborations, established by the Blue Waters project on an ongoing basis, combine application developers, discipline scientists, and Blue Waters' computing experts. Together, they optimize, scale, and re-engineer applications to run on Blue Waters once it comes online.
• Consulting Office. The consulting office helps researchers who plan to use Blue Waters better prepare their applications to run on the computer.
• Application and Training Workshops. Workshops are held at least twice per year and include discussions on a wide array of topics related to developing science and engineering applications for massive supercomputers like Blue Waters.
• Integrated Application Development Environment. A team is integrating a rich set of tools into a development environment that will support the creation of codes that can be scaled up to run on Blue Waters. The environment will include debuggers, compilers, mathematical libraries, support tools, and workflow frameworks that can be used to automatically guide complex, multistep calculations.

Contact the Blue Waters Consulting Office at bwconsult@ncsa.illinois.edu for more information on these efforts.