An Exascale Approach to Software and Hardware Design

The demands of exascale require a complete rethinking of the software and hardware development process. For the past 10-15 years, horizontal layers of software and hardware design and development have been the de facto standard of creating HPC software. This situation is due in part to the influences of funding methods, research incentives, software methods, the open source movement and commercial outsourcing and specialization. This horizontal design approach leads to the development of discrete components in the software stack and independent hardware components – all developed with different methods, requirements and quality. Past generations of system software (from the earliest operating systems through to the original community source movement with Unix) and hardware, showed some degree of top-to-bottom vertical design. The last 10-15 years, however, have been dominated by plug-and-play componentization that is focused on horizontal functionality and portability.