Section: Research Program

Parallel Computing and Architectures

Following the current trends of the evolution of HPC systems architectures, it is expected that future Exascale systems (i.e. Sustaining ${10}^{18}$ flops) will have millions of cores. Although the exact architectural details and trade-offs of such systems are still unclear, it is anticipated that an overall concurrency level of $O\left({10}^9\right)$ threads/tasks will probably be required to feed all computing units while hiding memory latencies. It will obviously be a challenge for many applications to scale to that level, making the underlying system sound like “embarrassingly parallel hardware.”

From the programming point of view, it becomes a matter of being able to expose extreme parallelism within applications to feed the underlying computing units. However, this increase in the number of cores also comes with architectural constraints that actual hardware evolution prefigures: computing units will feature extra-wide SIMD and SIMT units that will require aggressive code vectorization or “SIMDization”, systems will become hybrid by mixing traditional CPUs and accelerators units, possibly on the same chip as the AMD APU solution, the amount of memory per computing unit is constantly decreasing, new levels of memory will appear, with explicit or implicit consistency management, etc. As a result, upcoming extreme-scale system will not only require unprecedented amount of parallelism to be efficiently exploited, but they will also require that applications generate adaptive parallelism capable to map tasks over heterogeneous computing units.

The current situation is already alarming, since European HPC end-users are forced to invest in a difficult and time-consuming process of tuning and optimizing their applications to reach most of current supercomputers' performance. It will go even worse with the emergence of new parallel architectures (tightly integrated accelerators and cores, high vectorization capabilities, etc.) featuring unprecedented degree of parallelism that only too few experts will be able to exploit efficiently. As highlighted by the ETP4HPC initiative, existing programming models and tools won't be able to cope with such a level of heterogeneity, complexity and number of computing units, which may prevent many new application opportunities and new science advances to emerge.

The same conclusion arises from a non-HPC perspective, for single node embedded parallel architectures, combining heterogeneous multicores, such as the ARM big.LITTLE processor and accelerators such as GPUs or DSPs. The need and difficulty to write programs able to run on various parallel heterogeneous architectures has led to initiatives such as HSA, focusing on making it easier to program heterogeneous computing devices. The growing complexity of hardware is a limiting factor to the emergence of new usages relying on new technology.