Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

NSF Workshop on Report on Future Directions for Parallel and Distributed Computing (SPX 2019)

January 6th, 2020 / in NSF, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

Example Software-Hardware Stack for Heterogeneous Systems (from www.semanticscholar.org)

The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Due to technology challenges and potential societal benefits, NSF has provided sustained funding for issues surrounding effective scaling of parallel and distributed computing, including through the Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) Program, begun in 2012, and the Scalable Parallelism in the Extreme (SPX) Program, started in 2016.

To illuminate directions in this area, NSF commissioned a workshop held in June 2019 as part of the Federated Computing Research Conference and led by Michael Carbin of MIT and Scott D. Stoller of Stony Brook University.

The workshop report was recently issued. Quoting the report, the crux of the challenge is:

 … the highest-performance future computing systems will need to be specialized—customized in the hardware itself and the algorithms and abstractions underlying the software—to fit the exact organization and requirements of the application at hand. Systems incorporating a variety of specialized components form heterogeneous platforms that are potentially very powerful but also potentially make application development more difficult.

…

These challenges have put parallel and distributed computing at a crossroads: new abstractions are needed to manage the complexity of developing systems at the scale and heterogeneity demanded by new computing opportunities. This applies at all levels of the computing stack, encompassing the many disciplines (subfields of CS) that contribute to each level: the application itself (traditionally High-Performance Computing (HPC) but increasingly a variety of other application domains as well), its algorithmic design and implementation (Theory and Algorithms), the programming languages and implementations of the application and the underlying computing platform (Programming Languages, and Systems), and the underlying hardware platform (Computer Architecture). 

The report goes on to give recommendations and identify research directions, as well as risks.

This report advances earlier reports from both the Computing Community Consortium (CCC):

 and DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT):

as well as complements efforts by IEEE Rebooting Computing. 

Disclaimer: Posts on this blog report on happenings, opportunities, and issues that arise in the broad computing research community, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the CCC or the National Science Foundation.


Related posts:

  1. National Academies Final Report on Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure
  2. CCC Quantum Computing Workshop Report and NSF Quantum Solicitation
  3. NSF Workshop Report on Grand Challenges in Edge Computing
  4. Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure
  5. NSF Workshop Report on Side and Covert Channels in Computing Systems
NSF Workshop on Report on Future Directions for Parallel and Distributed Computing (SPX 2019)

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