Departmental Colloquium

System Software Challenges for Exascale Systems

Ron Brightwell

Technical Manager of Scalable System Software, Computer Science Research Institute

Friday June 1, 2012
2:00 pm - 5317 Sennott Square (Seminar Room)

Refreshments and cookies will be served.

Hosted by Dr. Jack Lange

Abstract

Achieving the next three orders of magnitude performance increase to move from petascale to exascale computing will require significant advancements in several fundamental areas. Recent studies have outlined many of the challenges in hardware and software that will be needed. In this talk, I will examine these challenges with respect to operating systems, runtime systems, and interconnect programming interfaces. I will describe the repercussions of anticipated changes to computing and networking hardware, and discuss the impact that alternative parallel programming and execution models will have on the software stack. I will also present some ideas on possible approaches that address some of these challenges.

Biography of Speaker

Ron Brightwell received his BS in Mathematics in 1991 and his MS in Computer Science in 1994 from Mississippi State University. He joined Sandia National Laboratories in 1995 and is currently Technical Manager of the Scalable System Software Department. While at Sandia, he has designed and developed software for lightweight compute node operating systems and high-performance networks on several large-scale massively parallel systems, including the Intel Paragon and TeraFLOPS, and the Cray T3 and XT series of machines. He has authored more than 70 refereed journal and conference publications, and is currently the the Program Chair for the System Software Track at Supercomputing 2012. His research interests include high-performance, scalable communication interfaces and protocols for system area networks, operating systems for massively parallel processing machines, and parallel program performance analysis libraries and tools.