The Changing Face of Scientific and Engineering Computing

Douglass Post
2013 Computing in science & engineering (Print)  
F r o m T h e E d i t o r s 4 Copublished by the IEEE CS and the AIP 1521-9615/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE Computing in SCienCe & engineering F r o m T h e E d i t o r s i recently participated in a federal agency workshop to identify ways to improve the productivity of science-based high-performance computing (hpc) software applications. the agency is concerned that hpc applications will not be available to utilize next-generation high-performance computersin the exascale range (approximately 10 18
more » ... loatingpoint operations [flops] per second). the computing power now becoming available (10 15 −10 18 flops) will give society the unprecedented capability to use hpc to solve some of the hardest technical problems facing the world today. this computing power will let us simultaneously • utilize highly accurate solution methods, • include all of the scientific effects we know to be important, • validate the correctness of the models for those effects and quantify their uncertainties, • model full-scale systems, and • achieve reasonable problem turnaround times. over the next few years, the lower end of this computing power will become available to the general scientific and engineering community, not just to a handful of major research centers. the impact of hpc is already being felt. it's enabling major advances in scientific research and engineering and bringing about a paradigm shift in research and engineering methods. to name a few, science-based hpc applications are beginning to be able to • predict the weather with greater accuracy than before (including the unusually complex path of major storm systems such as hurricane sandy); • improve automotive safety through crash simulations; • increase the fuel efficiency and reduce the noise of new commercial aircraft (for example, the boeing 787 versus the 777), and • analyze data from large telescopes and satellites to identify planets orbiting other stars. these applications, together with high-performance computers, are enabling significant advances in scientific research and engineering design. for example, theoretical chemistry is now done with large-scale hpc computer applications such as the general atomic and molecular electronic structure system (gamess; www.msg. ameslab.gov/gamess), gaussian (www.gaussian.com), and nwchem (www.nwchem-sw.org). the impact of computational chemistry was recently recognized by the 2013 nobel prize in chemistry. the discovery of the higgs boson required the use of hpc to analyze large experimental datasets to conclusively identify the small number of decays of a higgs boson out of many, many decays of other collision products. clearly, hpc will continue to revolutionize scientific research. but while there are many challenges for hpc, there are initiatives that are emerging for handling these challenges. hPC Challenges hpc isn't only computers or software applications. successful hpc requires an ecosystem of sponsors, subject matter expert users, software applications, validation experiments and data, high-speed networks, high-performance computers, and data storage facilities. without every single one of these, the system is crippled. today, the weakest link is software, partly because each technical area generally requires a different software application. the study of protein folding, aircraft performance, weather forecasting, and other complex phenomena require different software applications even if they can all take advantage of the same networks,
doi:10.1109/mcse.2013.132 fatcat:cbfl565sojbqnbd6nsxkhtoddy