Symposium chair: Nick Nystrom, nystrom@psc.edu

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center hosted a Petascale Applications Symposium addressing Multilevel Parallelism and Locality-Aware Algorithms, at PSC on June 22-23, 2007. The Symposium featured invited presentations and panels by leading developers of highly scalable software infrastructure.

The Symposium targeted researchers planning to respond to NSF's recent solicitation, Accelerating Discovery in Science and Engineering Through Petascale Simulations and Analysis (PetaApps), available at www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf07559 . It provided a timely forum for exchange of ideas and for additional team building. Several breaks and a reception on Friday evening provided valuable time to meet the speakers and other participants.

The omnipresence of multicore processors in computers ranging from notebooks to leadership- class systems is only one step in our journey to petascale systems which will comprise vast numbers of tightly coupled, manycore processors. Petascale systems will enable unprecedented discoveries throughout science and engineering. Their deep hierarchy of cores, processors, cache, memory, and interconnect will create exciting opportunities for new algorithms that exploit the architectural hierarchy to increase scalability, efficiency, and accessible simulation sizes. Scaling applications to O(10⁶) cores, coupling multiphysics and multiscale applications, numerical convergence and stability, analysis and visualization, and hybrid programming models are only a few examples of the challenges and opportunities that will require the combined attention of multidisciplinary development teams.

Proceedings

The proceedings are available on the web at http://www.psc.edu/seminars/PAS/proceedings.php.

Questions

Contact PSC at 412/268-4960 or Symposium chair Nick Nystrom at nystrom@psc.edu.