The petascale era of supercomputing is barely underway, but the effort to reach the exascale level has already begun. In fact, it began three years ago as part of an international effort to develop a software infrastructure for exaflop supercomputers.

The International Exascale Software Project (IESP) was formed with the realization that current software used for terascale and now petascale computing is inadequate for exascale computing. The IESP brings together government agencies, vendors and other stakeholders in the HPC community, with the goal of designing and building a system software stack to support this future level of computing. That will entail managing parallelism an order of magnitude higher than the current top systems in the field today.

In an interview, Jack Dongarra from The University of Tennessee says, “Today we have very little software that runs at the petascale level. We have software approaching terascale software, in that it routinely performs at the teraflop levels on our largest machines. Only through extreme efforts do we get to claim petaflop levels for our applications. It really requires a rethinking.

When we made the transition from vector machines to parallel systems, that was a big deal. We’re encountering the same kinds of transition today in terms of rewriting our software, just in terms of the things that I deal with, which is writing numerical libraries. We’re rewriting everything to address issues of multicore.”

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