Design Space Exploration
While many details of exascale computer architectures remain undefined, one thing is certain: Exascale machines will be very different from today’s supercomputers.
In order to deliver 50 – 100 times today’s performance (while also keeping energy consumption at acceptable levels) vendors will need to make aggressive, fundamental changes to the processor and machine architectures that scientific codes have relied on for decades.
By working closely with vendors, the Design Space Exploration effort works to anticipate major shifts in computer architectures — such as increasing parallelism, decreasing single-threaded performance, and changes in memory hierarchy — and create the tools scientists need to analyze, modify, and tune scientific software to exploit exascale architectures more fully.