eXascale Programming Environment and System Software (XPRESS)

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) with its research partners: OakRidge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), Indiana University (IU), Louisiana State University (LSU), University of Houston (UH), University of Oregon (UO), and the University of North Carolina (UNC) have collaborated on the XPRESS project since September of 2012. XPRESS was funded through the DOE Office of Science Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research via the 2012 X-Stack Program of Programming Challenges, Runtime Systems, and Tools. The XPRESS project aims to develop and prototype a revolutionary software system for extreme-scale computing for both exascale and strong-scaled problems. The XPRESS collaborative research project will advance the state-of-the-art in high performance computing and enable exascale computing for current and future DOE mission-critical applications and supporting systems. XPRESS is exploring a set of innovations in execution models, programming models and methods, runtime and operating system software, dynamic and adaptive scheduling and resource management algorithms and mechanisms, and instrumentation and introspection techniques to achieve unprecedented efficiency, scalability, and programmability in the context of billion-way parallelism while providing seamless migration of legacy application codes. The strong vertically integrated research team brings complementary capabilities and accomplishments to achieve comprehensive coverage of this complex research and design space.

The goals of the XPRESS research project are to: A. enable exascale performance capability for DOE applications, both current and future, B. develop and deliver a practical computing system software X-stack, OpenX, for future practical DOE exascale computing systems, and C. provide programming methods and environments for effective means of expressing application and system software for portable exascale system execution.

This proposal describes activities for continued exploration during a fourth year. Activities during the extension year will emphasize continued development and hardening of the primary thrusts of the XPRESS project; expanded support for and integration with applications; and substantial engagement with other X-Stack projects.