Exploring Emerging Memory Technologies in Extreme Scale High Performance Computing 

Abstract

Concerns about energy-efficiency and cost are forcing our community to reexamine system architectures, and, specifically, the memory and storage hierarchy. While memory and storage technologies have remained relatively stable for nearly two decades, new architectural features, such as deep memory hierarchies, non-volatile memory (NVM), and near-memory processing, have emerged as possible solutions. However, these architectural changes will have a major impact on HPC software systems and applications. To be effective, software and applications will need to be redesigned to exploit these new capabilities. In this talk, I will sample these emerging memory technologies, discuss their architectural and software implications, and describe several new approaches to programming these systems. One system is Papyrus (Parallel Aggregate Persistent -yru- Storage); it is a programming system that aggregates NVM from across the system for use as application data structures, such as vectors and key-value stores, while providing performance portability across emerging NVM hierarchies.

About the speaker

Jeffrey Vetter , Ph.D., is a Distinguished R&D Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). At ORNL, Vetter is the founding group leader of the Future Technologies Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division, and the founding director of the Experimental Computing Laboratory (ExCL). Vetter also holds joint appointment at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Vetter earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Vetter is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Distinguished Scientist Member of the ACM. In 2010, Vetter, as part of an interdisciplinary team from Georgia Tech, NYU, and ORNL, was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. In 2015, Vetter served as the SC15 Technical Program Chair. His recent books, entitled "Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale (Vols. 1 and 2)," survey the international landscape of HPC. See his website for more information: ft.ornl.gov/~vetter/ .

This talk is supported by the EPiGRAM-HS project (GA# 801039, epigram-hs.eu/ ).