Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


I am seeking a post-doctoral research associate to join a National Science Foundation (NSF) project on high-performance computing system reliability and energy efficiency modeling. If you are interested, or you know someone who might be interested, please share information on the position.

Extraordinary parallelism, unprecedented data locality and adaptive resilience: these are daunting architecture, system software and application challenges for exascale computing.

Cloud services now operate on the largest computing systems we have ever built on this planet, with service reliability expectations far higher than what we demand from scientific applications. Thus, I also believe there are lessons from cloud computing that are potentially applicable to computational science applications.

The reason we strive to protect data centers is obvious, their failure often has catastrophic business implications. Without doubt, though, some workloads are less affected by failure than others. If your web search for basket weaving supplies times out, you are probably content to retry the query a few seconds later. If your attempt to…

Evolution or revolution, it’s the persistent question. Can we build reliable exascale systems from extrapolations of current technology or will new approaches be required? There is no definitive answer, as almost any approach might be made to work at some level with enough heroic effort. The bigger question is what design would enable the most…