Communications of the ACM
Envisioning Supercomputers of the Future
The Argo Project has enlisted 40 researchers to devise a new approach for extreme-scale system software.
Credit: Texas Advanced Computing Center
A key goal of President Obama's National Strategic Computing Initiative is to expedite research and development into future exascale computing systems, and the Argo Project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy has enlisted 40 researchers to devise a new approach for extreme-scale system software.
The National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Chameleon environment for large-scale cloud computing research serves as the testbed for Argo Project concepts. The reconfigurable platform enables the research community to experiment with unique cloud computing architectures and explore new, architecturally facilitated cloud computing applications.
"To design new and innovative compute clouds and the applications they will run, academic researchers need much greater control, diversity, and visibility into the hardware and software infrastructure than is available with commercial cloud systems today," notes NSF's Jack Brassil.
Among the core aspects of future exascale systems undergoing testing with Chameleon are the Global Operating System, which manages machine configuration, resource allocation, and launching apps; the Linux-based Node Operating System, which provides interfaces for improved control of future exascale architectures; the concurrency runtime Argobots infrastructure that efficiently circulates work among computing resources; and the Backplane for Event and Control Notification, a framework that collects system performance data and sends it to controllers to take appropriate action.
Chameleon enables top-to-bottom system modification and control to support a wide range of cloud research and architectures.
From National Science Foundation
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found