| Director's Statement | |
| Profile | Background | Director's Statement | Working at ICL | Open Positions | |
This is an exciting time for computing. This year marks the beginning of the road to exa-scale computing. "Going to the exascale" will mean radical changes in computing architecture, software, and algorithms - basically, vastly increasing the levels of parallelism to the point of billions of threads working in tandem - which will force radical changes in how hardware is designed and how we go about solving problems. There are many computational and technical challenges ahead that must be overcome. The challenges are great, different than the current set of challenges, and exciting research problems await us. ICL's research agenda has never been stagnant; we have always taken leadership roles in enabling technologies for high performance computing. The life of Computational Science revolves around a multifaceted software ecosystem. But today there is (and should be) a real concern that this ecosystem of Computational Science, with all its complexities, is not ready for the major challenges that will soon confront the field. Domain scientists now want to create much larger, multi-dimensional applications in which a variety of previously independent models are coupled together, or even fully integrated. They hope to be able to run these applications on Peta and Exascale systems with millions to billions of threads of execution, to extract all performance that these platforms can deliver, to recover automatically from the processor failures that regularly occur at this scale, and to do all this without sacrificing good programmability. This vision of what Computational Science wants to become contains numerous unsolved and exciting problems for the software and algorithm research community. Unfortunately, it also highlights aspects of the current software environment that are either immature, under funded, or both. Advancing to the next stage of growth for computational simulation and modeling will require us to solve basic research problems in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the same time as we create and promulgate a new paradigm for the development of scientific software. To make progress on both fronts simultaneously will require a level of sustained, interdisciplinary collaboration among the core research communities that, in the past, has only been achieved by forming and supporting research centers dedicated to such a common purpose. I believe that the time has come for the leaders of the Computational Science movement to focus their energies on creating such software research centers to carry out this indispensable part of the mission. I have every confidence that our community stands ready to step up again to this momentous new effort. Our plans for the future are founded on our accomplishments as well as our vision. That vision challenges us to be a world leader in enabling technologies and software for scientific computing. We are helping to maintain the balanced software ecosystem. We have been and will continue to be providers of high performance tools to tackle science's most challenging problems and to play a major role in the development of standards for scientific computing in general. We have ongoing efforts to strengthen our organization and to ensure the proper balance and integration of research and projects. The pace of change will continue to accelerate in the coming years.This is truly a time of great excitement in the design of software and algorithms for the next generation, perhaps a once in a life time opportunity, and we will be part of that continuing evolution of the high performance computing ecology. During these exciting times, I am grateful to our sponsors for their continued endorsement of our efforts. My special thanks and congratulations go to the ICL staff and students for their skill, dedication, and tireless efforts in making the ICL one of the best centers in the world for enabling technologies. - Jack Dongarra, Director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory |
