Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Production Quality Ecosystem for Programming and Executing eXtreme-scale Applications (EPEXA)

A team of researchers from three institutions will work collaboratively to design and develop a software framework that implements high-performance methods for irregular and dynamic computations that are poorly supported by current programming paradigms. The framework, titled EPEXA (Ecosystem for Programming and Executing eXtreme Applications), will create a production-quality, general-purpose, community-supported, open-source software ecosystem that attacks the twin challenges of programmer productivity and portable performance for advanced scientific applications on modern high-performance computers. Employing science-driven co-design, the team will transition into production a successful research prototype of a new programming model and accelerate the growth of the community of computer scientists and domain scientists employing these tools for their research. The project bridges the so-called "valley of death" between successful proofs of principle to an implementation with enough quality, performance, and community support to motivate application scientists and other researchers to adopt the tools and invest their own effort into the community. In addition to work on the framework development, the project includes training of postdoctoral scholars, graduate and undergraduate students as well as education, outreach and scientific community engagement activities. Specifically, the new powerful data-flow programming model and associated parallel runtime directly address multiple challenges faced by scientists as they attempt to employ rapidly changing computer technologies including current massively-parallel, hybrid, and many-core systems. Both data-intensive and compute-intensive applications are enabled in part by the general programming model and through the ability to target multiple backends or runtime systems. Also enabled is the creation by domain scientists of new domain-specific languages (DSLs) for both shared and distributed-memory computers. EPEXA contributes to the design and development of state-of-the-art software environments that leverage the National Science Foundation's investments in cyberinfrastructure to enable scientific discovery across all disciplines. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.