Professors Chapman and Gabriel Receive 3-Year, $650K Department of Energy Award


Professors Chapman and Gabriel Receive 3-Year, $650K Department of Energy Award

Professor Barbara Chapman and Professor Edgar Gabriel received a three-year, $650,000 Department of Energy award to participate in the development of extreme scale compiler, runtime and library tools for future Exascale computers.

The project, titled “eXascale PRogramming Environment and System Software (XPRESS),” involves research partners from Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Indiana University, Louisiana State University, University of Houston, University of Oregon, and University of North Carolina. The group will undertake research and software development efforts to deliver a revolutionary software system for extreme-scale computing for both Exascale and strong-scaled problems. The work is for the Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science and its 2012 X-Stack Program.

The XPRESS research project will explore a set of innovations in the following areas:

  • Execution models
  • Programming models and methods
  • Runtime and operating system software
  • Dynamic and adaptive scheduling and resource management algorithms and mechanisms
  • Fault tolerance and energy management strategies
  • Instrumentation and introspection techniques
  • Advanced compilation techniques

The objective is to achieve unprecedented efficiency, scalability, programmability, availability, and energy efficiency in the context of billion-way parallelism while providing seamless migration of legacy application codes. The project will advance the state of the art in high performance computing and enable Exascale computing for current and future DOE mission-critical applications and supporting systems.

As a collaborative partner in the XPRESS project, the UH team led by Professor Chapman will contribute by ensuring that legacy OpenMP/OpenACC and Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications will continue to execute in the new software stack and will explore strategies for migrating legacy codes to the new programming model being developed in XPRESS. A prototype system for legacy mitigation will be developed and evaluated for OpenMP and MPI legacy codes. The core runtime environment will combine strategic advances in runtime and operating system software of the XPRESS stack.

More information:
Professor Barbara Chapman’s HPCTools Research Group: http://www.cs.uh.edu/%7ehpctools
Professor Edgar Gabriel: http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~gabriel