Llnl-prop-652542-draft fastForward 2 R&D
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- 4.3Fault Tolerance and Resiliency
- 4.4Memory Technology
- 4.5Programmability
4.2ConcurrencyThe end of increasing single compute node performance by increasing Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) and/or higher clock rates has left explicit parallelism as the only mechanism in silicon to increase performance of a system. Scaling up in absolute performance will require scaling up the number of functional units accordingly, projected to be in the billions for exascale systems. Efficiently exploiting this level of concurrency, particularly in terms of applications programs, is a challenge for which there currently are no good solutions. Memory latency further compounds the concurrency issue. We are already at or beyond our ability to find enough activities to keep hardware busy in classical architectures while long-time events such as memory references occur. While the flattening of clock rates has one positive effect in that such latencies will not increase dramatically by themselves, the explosive growth in concurrency will substantially increase the occurrence of high latency events; and the routing, buffering, and management of these events will introduce even more delay. When applications require synchronization or other interactions between different threads, this latency will exponentially increase the facilities needed to manage independent activities, which in turn forces up the level of concurrent operations that must be derived from an application to hide them. A further complication arises from the explosive growth in the ratio of energy to transport data versus the energy to compute with it. At the exascale level, this transport energy becomes a front-and-center issue in terms of architecture. Reducing the transport energy will require creative packaging, interconnect, and architecture changes to bring the data needed by a computation energy-wise “closer to” the function units. This closeness translates directly into reducing the latency of such accesses in creative ways that are significantly better than today's multi-level cache hierarchies.
Exascale systems will continually experience failures, necessitating significant advances in the methods and tools for dealing with them. Achieving acceptable levels of resiliency in exascale systems will require improvement in hardware and software reliability, better understanding of the root cause of errors, better reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) collection and analysis, fault resilient algorithms and applications to assist the application developer, and local recovery and migration. The goal of research in this area is to improve the application MTTI by greater than100 times, so that applications can run for many hours. Additional goals are to improve by a factor of 10 times the hardware reliability and improve by a factor of 10 times the local recovery from errors. 4.4Memory TechnologyInnovation in memory architecture is needed to address power, capacity, bandwidth, and latency challenges facing extreme-scale systems. The power consumption of current technology memory systems is predicted to be unsustainable for exascale deployment. Without new approaches, meeting power goals will require a drastic reduction in bytes per CPU core, because memory uses a large proportion of system power. Additionally, trends show a decrease in both memory capacity and bandwidth relative to system scale. The rate of memory density improvement has gone from a 4-times improvement every three years to a 2-times improvement every three years (a 30-percent annual rate of improvement). Consequently, the cost of memory technology is not improving as rapidly as the cost of floating-point capability. Thus, without new approaches, the memory capacity of an exascale machine will be severely constrained; it is anticipated that systems in the 2020 timeframe will suffer a 10-times loss in memory capacity relative to compute power. Research in advanced memory technologies, including high-capacity, low-power stacked memory or hybrid DRAM/NVRAM configurations could supply the capacity required while simultaneously balancing the power requirements. Likewise, reduced memory bandwidth and increased latency will compound the memory capacity challenge. Neither bandwidth nor latency has improved at rates comparable to Moore’s Law for processing units. On current petascale systems, memory access at all levels is the limiting factor in most applications, so the situation for extreme-scale systems will be critical. Innovative approaches are needed to provide critical improvements in latency and bandwidth, but techniques for improving the efficiency of data movement can also help. Options include better data analysis to anticipate needed data before it is requested (thus hiding latency), determining when data can be efficiently recomputed instead of stored (reducing demands for bandwidth), closer integration with on- and off-chip networks, and improved data layouts (to maximize the use of data when it is moved between levels.) 4.5ProgrammabilityProgrammability is the crosscutting property that reflects the ease by which application programs may be constructed. Programmability affects developer productivity and ultimately leads to the productivity of an HPC system as a tool to enable scientific research and discovery. Programmability itself involves three stages of application development: (1) program algorithm capture and representation, (2) program correctness debugging, and (3) program performance optimization. All levels of the system, including the programming environment, the system software, and the system hardware architecture, affect programmability. The challenges to achieving programmability are myriad, related both to the representation of the user application algorithm and to underlying resource usage.
Novel execution models and architectures may increase programmability, thereby enhancing the productivity of DOE scientists. Download 150.07 Kb. Share with your friends:
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