9/17/12: X-Stack Portfolio Kickoff Meeting

Agenda

The Agenda is here.

The meeting includes principal investigators selected for funding in the 2012 X-Stack Funding Opportunity as well as key contributors from synergistic Exascale research efforts. Additional information and guidance about this meeting will be provided soon.

Significant contributors of each project will:

1. Share vision and technical details of their projects;
2. Discuss collaboration and leveraging of research deliverables of the X-Stack portfolio;
3. Help create a complete vision for X-Stack software research;
4. Help develop alternatives for the X-Stack architecture and interfaces.

We expect that these activities will be extended to include Exascale research efforts carried by participants who are not X-Stack awardees.

Project Handouts

Include in your project handout the URL of your project website. The requirement for your project website was communicated in your award letter. The project website should include sufficient information about your project to enable the community to clearly understand what will be accomplished, and it should include contact information for the different components of your project.

Sessions

The parallel and panel sessions for our kickoff meeting depend on the questions that we, as a group, decide we need to address during the time allocated for these sessions. We will decide on 5-6 questions for the parallel sessions, and on 4 questions for each panel session.

For the 3 panel sessions, there are at least five panelists, each presenting four slides, one for each selected panel question. The envisioned process is the following:

• The moderator asks three panelists to answer question 1 (about 2 minutes per panelist, 6 minutes total)
• A 9 minute discussion among panelists, with questions from the audience follows.
• The moderator repeats the process for question 2 – 4.

The parallel sessions are working sessions: all participants should plan to contribute to the discussions. A moderator ensures that no one dominates the discussion and that all have the opportunity to speak and contribute.

Panel Session 1

Panel Session 1: Dan Quinlan

Roles: Milind Kulkarni, David Padua, Andrew Lumsdaine, John Shalf, Vivek Sarkar, John Bell; and Tina has agreed to be our scribe.

Questions:

1. What is the role of DSLs within Exascale and what impact does this have on vendors?
2. Will we see language extensions or new parallel languages from the Exascale program?
3. Where in the software stack is resilience best addressed; or need it be addressed uniformly everywhere?
4. What is the role of correctness in the development of Exascale software?
5. How fast will hardware change, how fast do we expect software and programming models to adapt? (the software stack?)