Project Final Report: The Institute for Sustained Performance, Energy, and Resilience (SUPER)

Over the next five years (2012–2016), computational scientists working on behalf of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE SC) will exploit a new generation of petascale computing resources to make previously inaccessible discoveries in a broad range of disciplines including chemistry, fusion energy, materials science, and physics. The computational systems underpinning this work will increase in performance potential from tens to hundreds of PFlop/s, and will evolve significantly from those in use today: concurrency will scale exponentially; accelerators such as graphical processing units (GPUs) will be utilized; and even the memory hierarchy will change with the incorporation of a new generation of persistent devices (e.g., phase change memory). To ensure that DOE’s computational scientists can successfully exploit this emerging generation of leadership-class computing systems, the University of Southern California (USC) has assembled a broad team of computer scientists with the expertise to address their most pressing challenges: (a) end-to-end performance optimization, including single-node performance, interprocessor communication, load balancing and I/O; (b) performance portability for new systems, including heterogeneous processors and new memory hierarchies; (c) management of energy consumption; and (d) resilient computation.