Science at the petascale: Tools in the toolbox

Petascale computing will require coordinating the actions of 100,000+ processors, and directing the flow of data between up to six levels of memory hierarchy and along channels that differ by over a factor of 100 in bandwidth. Amdahl's law requires that petascale applications have less than 0.001% sequential or replicated work in order to be at least 50% efficient. These are profound challenges for all but the most regular or embarrassingly parallel applications, yet we also demand that not just bigger and better, but fundamentally new science. In this presentation I will discuss how we are attempting to confront simultaneously the complexities of petascale computation while increasing our scientific productivity. I hope that I can convince you that our development of MADNESS (multiresolution adaptive numerical scientific simulation) is not as crazy as it sounds.