High performance computing has become the third pillar of science and technology, providing the superior computational capability required for dramatic advances in fields such as DNA analysis, drug design and astrophysics. However, during the past decade, progress has been impeded by a growing lack of adequate language and tool support. In today's dominating programming paradigm, users are forced to adopt a low-level programming style similar to assembly language if they want to fully exploit the capabilities of parallel machines. This leads to high-cost software production and error-prone programs that are difficult to write, reuse, and maintain. Emerging peta-scale architectures with hundreds of thousands of processors, and applications of growing size and complexity will further aggravate this problem.
This talk will outline the state-of-the-art in high performance computing and identify the challenges and requirements posed by future "high productivity computing systems" and their applications. We will then focus on important trends in programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and tools that address these issues. The talk concludes with describing key features of the architecture developed in the DARPA-funded "Cascade" project and its high-level programming language.
Hans P. Zima is a Principal Scientist at JPL, California Institute of Technology, and a Professor of Applied Computer Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.
His major research interests have been in the fields of programming languages, compilers, and software tools. He led the design of PROGRESS, one of the first high-level real-time programming languages (1973), and of SUPERB, the first Fortran-based compilation system for distributed-memory architectures (1989). He was the chief designer of the Vienna Fortran language (1992) which became a major input for High Performance Fortran. His current research focuses on on the design of an advanced programming language in the framework of the DARPA-sponsored HPCS project "Cascade", which targets the development of a high productivity computing system in the petaflops range for the 2007-2010 timeframe.
Dr. Zima is the author or co-author of more than 150 publications, including 4 books.