Considering Time in Designing Large-Scale Systems for Scientific Computing

Nan-Chen Chen, Sarah Poon, Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Cecilia R. Aragon
2016 Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '16  
High performance computing (HPC) has driven collaborative science discovery for decades. Exascale computing platforms, currently in the design stage, will be deployed around 2022. The next generation of supercomputers is expected to utilize radically different computational paradigms, necessitating fundamental changes in how the community of scientific users will make the most efficient use of these powerful machines. However, there have been few studies of how scientists work with exascale or
more » ... lose-to-exascale HPC systems. Time as a metaphor is so pervasive in the discussions and valuation of computing within the HPC community that it is worthy of close study. We utilize time as a lens to conduct an ethnographic study of scientists interacting with HPC systems. We build upon recent CSCW work to consider temporal rhythms and collective time within the HPC sociotechnical ecosystem and provide considerations for future system design.
doi:10.1145/2818048.2819988 dblp:conf/cscw/ChenPRA16 fatcat:xasd2shhfvf25js5o4o5xqmpty