Sponsored by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the BoF will address a variety of topics, including:

• scaling properties of benchmark suites
• scalable machine models
• application modeling to predict scaling for future machines
• the challenge of preparing applications for petascale environments
• the importance of all these issues to petascale acquisition decisions

Representatives of large-system vendors, funding agencies, infrastructure operators, application development groups, and others with a stake in the successful design, operation and use of petascale systems are invited to attend.

The BoF is related to the efforts of the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Evaluation Center, which is led by researchers at RENCI and SDSC. The Cyberinfrastructure Center uses a wide range of analysis tools to predict and evaluate the effectiveness of innovative and future systems in addressing scientific problems of interest to the NSF. The project seeks to advance the development of cyberinfrastructure by creating and validating performance models of strategic NSF computational science applications and by assessing the interdependence of alternative hardware, middleware and software implementations on application performance.

The BoF session will be used to begin planning for a series of workshops on petascale performance and application scalability issues.

RENCI, Catalyst for Innovation
RENCI brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

According to RENCI Director Dan Reed, the future holds great possibilities for democratizing information, personalizing medical care and giving people the ability to store an entire petaflop of data on a device as simple and small as an iPod. The future also poses challenging questions about how to protect personal information and how to balance our needs for security, privacy and personal freedom.

Technology, in and of itself, is neither bad nor good; it is up to people to use technology to drive positive change, Reed told a crowd who came to the UNC-Chapel Hill campus on May 30 to hear his talk Computing the Future: Release 2016. From 1 terabyte/second research networks to embedded sensors that monitor bodily functions to a global economy that could change our long-standing ideas about work and education, Reed speculated on where we’ve been and where we might be going.