X-Stack Software Research

The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) of the Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby announces its interest in receiving applications from Computer Science (CS) researchers in the area of X-Stack Software Research. The X-Stack refers to the scientific software stack that supports extreme scale scientific computing, from operating systems to development environments. Multi-Institutional applications with cohesive emphasis on transformational computer science discoveries that address key challenges on the path to exascale computing are encouraged. In addition to other topics, this Announcement continues and extends topics of research addressed under the ASCR program on Operating and Runtime Systems for Extreme Scale Scientific Computation, http://www.sc.doe.gov/grants/LAB07_23.html and http://www.sc.doe.gov/grants/FAPN07-23.html Exascale computer systems will be comprised of as many as a billion cores. Such systems will be capable of 10 billion-way concurrency in simultaneous operations. Industry reports indicate that data movement will be the limiting factor for exascale systems, rather than processors and computational operations, especially when power constraints are considered. At the same time, memory per core is expected to decline sharply for exaflop systems, and the performance of storage systems continues to lag far behind. Multi-level storage architectures that span multiple types of hardware are anticipated and will require new approaches to run-time data management and analysis. This Funding Opportunity Announcement invites basic computer science research applications to address a variety of challenges in creating the software stack for extreme scale computing systems, the X-Stack, including operating and run-time systems, programming models and environments, and scientific workflow systems. Awards will not be made for design or development of applications for discipline-specific science.