Tools and Tool Support for the Exascale Era

The goal of this paper is to highlight the challenges in providing scalable tool support on exascale class machines and to identify key research and development needs as well as opportunities to meet these challenges. In this context we define tool support very broadly as software that helps programmers to understand, optimize and fix their codes as well as software that facilitates interaction between application, run-time, and hardware. This includes tools for performance analysis, static and run-time optimization, debugging, correctness verification and program transformation. This paper is intended as background material for the ASC exascale workshop, held in March 2011 in San Francisco, to stimulate discussion both within the tools area and across working groups. Further, this paper targets both the issues and requirements users have on tools in the exascale era as well as the requirements that need to be fulfilled by exascale systems to build scalable tools.