Experiences Readying Applications for Exascale

• Published in: SC23: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis pp. 1 - 13
• Main Authors: Bauman, Paul T., Budiardja, Reuben D., Bykov, Dmytro, Chalmers, Noel, Chen, Jacqueline, Curtis, Nicholas, Day, Marc, Eisenbach, Markus, Esclapez, Lucas, Fanfarillo, Alessandro, Freitag, William, Frontiere, Nicholas, Georgiadou, Antigoni, Glenski, Joseph, Gottiparthi, Kalyana, Henry de Frahan, Marc T., Jansen, Gustav R., Joubert, Wayne, Lietz, Justin G., Kurzak, Jakub, Malaya, Nicholas, Messer, Bronson, McDougall, Damon, Mullowney, Paul, Nichols, Stephen, Norman, Matthew, Papatheodore, Thomas, Rood, Jon, Roth, Philip C., Sreepathi, Sarat, White, James, Wolfe, Noah
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: ACM 11.11.2023
• Subjects: Best practices; Exascale computing; Hardware; Leadership; Software; Software testing; Training
• ISSN: 2167-4337
• DOI: 10.1145/3581784.3607065

The advent of Exascale computing invites an assessment of existing best practices for developing application readiness on the world's largest supercomputers. This work details observations from the last four years in preparing scientific applications to run on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF) Frontier system. This paper addresses a range of topics in software including programmability, tuning, and portability considerations that are key to moving applications from existing systems to future installations. A set of representative workloads provides case studies for general system and software testing. We evaluate the use of early access systems for development across several generations of hardware. Finally, we discuss how best practices were identified and disseminated to the community through a wide range of activities including user-guides and trainings. We conclude with recommendations for ensuring application readiness on future leadership computing systems.