Workshop on Software Productivity for Extreme-scale Science, January 13-14, 2014, Hilton Hotel, Rockville, MD
While emerging extreme-scale computing systems provide unprecedented resources for scientific discovery, DOE’s scientific communities now face a crisis in extreme-scale scientific software productivity due to a powerful confluence of factors: ongoing disruptive changes in computer architectures and new frontiers in modeling, simulation, and analysis of complex multiscale and multiphysics phenomena. Research in mission-critical science and energy problems has become increasingly dependent on high-performance computing, but productivity in extreme-scale scientific application development has not kept pace. The principal issues are (1) a significant lag between extreme-scale hardware and algorithmic innovations and their effective use in applications, leading to poorly scaling codes; (2) obstacles in the combined use of independently developed software components; (3) lack of agile yet rigorous software engineering practices for high-performance computing; and (4) failure to consider the entire lifecycle of large scientific software efforts, leading to fragile, complicated application codes that are increasingly difficult to enhance.