Research Aims at Accelerating the Transition of Scientific Applications to Next-Generation Systems
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced plans to provide up to $12 million for research aimed at adapting scientific software to run on the coming generation of increasingly powerful supercomputers.
“The coming generation of supercomputers, as we move through and beyond the era of exascale computing, will bring a huge boost in capabilities for scientific investigation and discovery,” said Dr. Steve Binkley, Acting Director of DOE’s Office of Science. “Taking advantage of these capabilities will require adaptation to radically new computing architectures and programming environments. This research seeks to tackle these challenges in very systematic ways.”
The research will have two main areas of focus: (1) developing innovative approaches to updating scientific applications to adapt to the new parallel-programming environments of the coming generation of systems and (2) developing innovative methods of testing scientific applications to ensure that they function properly as they are adapted to the new systems and new features are added to the software.
The goal is to decrease the effort necessary to transition software to next-generation platforms, thereby helping to unlock the full potential of both the scientific software and the new computing platforms.
Applications will be open to DOE national laboratories, universities, industry, and nonprofit research institutions. Funding is to be awarded competitively, on the basis of peer review, and is expected to be in the form of three-year awards.
Planned funding is up to $12 million for three-year awards beginning in Fiscal Year 2021, pending congressional appropriations.
The DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement, “X-Stack: Programming Environments For Scientific Computing,” issued by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) within the Department’s Office of Science, is to be found on the ASCR funding opportunities page.