Advancing scientific progress in domains such as physics, energy and materials science by developing and deploying applications in computing clusters of hundreds of thousand CPU cores is exciting, yet very challenging. The European Commission-funded project EXA2PRO – Enhancing Programmability and boosting Performance Portability for Exascale Computing Systems - will design and develop a framework to enable the efficient deployment of applications on supercomputing systems.
This project is developing a set of tools that addresses challenges imposed by the increasing heterogeneity of supercomputing centres. The EXA2PRO framework will include:
- high-level software abstractions that provide performance portability – that is, consistent performance on different computing architectures
- memory management tools that improve memory utilization
- a runtime system that provides multi-criteria scheduling and load balancing in heterogeneous computing architectures
Additionally, the EXA2PRO framework will integrate novel software engineering tools that improve the design quality of the source code of applications designed for supercomputing centres, as well as allowing users to quantify the economic impact of source code quality improvements.
Four applications from four different domains – high-energy physics, materials science, chemical processes for cleaner environment and energy storage – will be deployed at Jülich supercomputing centre using the EXA2PRO framework. By exploiting the accelerators of heterogeneous systems, the simulation of more complex problems will be possible and the results that will be obtained are expected to have significant impact in the scientific community and industry.