Authors: Susan Squires, Michael L. Van De Vanter, and Lawrence G. Votta
Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) Quarterly: High Productivity Computing Systems and the Path Towards Usable Petascale Computing, Volume 2 Number 4a, November 2006, pp. 52-61. 10 pages (PDF)
Introduction (partial):
The challenge of utilizing supercomputers effectively at ever increasing scale is not being met, a phenomenon perceived within the high performance computing (HPC) community as a crisis of "productivity." Acknowledging that narrow focus on peak machine performance numbers has not served HPC goals well in the past, and acknowledging that the "productivity" of a computing system is not a well-understood phenomenon, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) created the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program:
- Industry vendors were challenged to develop a new generation of supercomputers that are dramatically (10 times!) more productive, not just faster; and
- A community of vendor teams and non-vendor research institutions were challenged to develop an understanding of supercomputer productivity that will serve to guide future supercomputer development and to support productivity-based evaluation of computing systems.
The HPCS Productivity Team at Sun Microsystems responded with two commitments:
- A community of vendor teams and non-vendor research institutions were challenged to develop an understanding of supercomputer productivity that will serve to guide future supercomputer development and to support productivity-based evaluation of computing systems.
- Put the investigation of these phenomena on the soundest scientific basis possible, drawing on well-established research methodologies from relevant fields, many of which are unfamiliar within the HPC community.
Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) Quarterly: High Productivity Computing Systems and the Path Towards Usable Petascale Computing, Volume 2 Number 4a, November 2006, pp. 52-61. 10 pages (PDF)