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Key Difficulties in HPC Applications

The consensus of the group was that there was a great need:

  1. for code development tools;

  2. for greater reliability of HPC systems;

  3. for code migration tools;

  4. to reduce system software inefficiencies;

  5. for looking at exciting and innovative applications areas, (to help the HPC industry by stimulating new demands). This might involve very data intensive applications (in contradistinction to compute intensive ones) but also harder and more complex problems, irregular data structures and less obviously load balance-able problems;

  6. to generally increase market confidence in HPC as technology that is becoming mainstream and that is now robust enough for real commercial and industrial applications.

These technical and economic needs are strongly correlated. The group believes that the technical deficiencies and general unreliability of HPC platforms are the key to why industry and commerce are still only gradually up-taking HPC technology in mainstream and core business activities. However, the technical deficiencies are largely due to insufficient commercial funding and industry-driven backing. It is not clear how this loop can be broken as HPC alone is probably too small an area to viably support commercial strength software. Government intervention in the form of programmes like EUROPORT or the UK's Parallel Applications Programme have been suggested as possibilities.

The group identified a number of general observations about HPC technology and Applications:



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Characteristics of HPC Previous: Introduction




Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu