Discussing TeraScale Computing

{jcomments off}

Representatives from four major projects investigating on future massively parallel and distributed terascale computing platforms joined in a collaborative workshop discussing the future technological developments and obstacles to face. This year's CASTNESS ("Computing Architectures, Software tools and nano-Technologies for Numerical and Embedded Scalable Systems") held in January 2011 in Rome grouped together the four projects funded by the European Commission under the  FET Proactive Intiative "Concurrent Tera-Device Computing" (TERACOMP) initiative - these are, by name:

• TERAFLUX: Exploiting Dataflow Parallelism in Teradevice Computing
• TRAMS: Terascale Reliable Adaptive Memory Systems
• EURETILE: EUropean REference TIled architecture Experiment
• S(o)OS: Service-oriented Operating Systems

The discussion ranged across the whole scope from hardware over operating systems to software development and programming models. All projects agree that the future challenges in these areas relate to the large scale and heterogeneity not only of fully integrated systems, but also within a single processor. Current approaches in hardware architecture, as well as operating system and programming level do not allow to handle this degree of scalability and heterogeneity, and therefore new, long-term approaches need to be investigated.

For a full list of (downloadable) presentations, please visit the CASTNESS website.