Our proposed technologies will directly improve the performance, resource utilization, productivity, and fault tolerance of many high performance NASA solver codes. Codes such as GEOS, ModelE, Snowflake, OVERFLOW, and FUN3D can achieve both short and long term benefits by adopting our proposed task-based methodology and scheduling tools. Our proposed technology is truly broad-base, and has no domain-specific requirements. It can benefit every NASA application that utilizes this task-based framework. In the short term, these tools will be able improve current hardware utilization and performance. Additionally, productivity will increase as the main focus of the codes will become the underlying science rather than the parallelization and communication needed to implement a high performance code base. Another short term benefit includes improved fault tolerance as a scheduled task-based approach will be able to recover from a scenario in which communication with a node is lost. Long term benefits focus on future-proof algorithms and increased scalability for many of the aforementioned applications. By decoupling the algorithms from the underlying hardware implementation, we will provide a framework that allows for rapid adaptation of new architectures. Scalability will also improve as the proposed scheduler will automatically distribute work to any additional nodes that were added to the cluster. Our scheduled task-based methodology has applications outside of NASA. Since our proposed technology does not have any domain-based restrictions, it can be utilized by any software system wishing to increase utilization and performance. Math libraries for heterogeneous architectures such as CULA, Arrayfire, NMath, and others will be easily scale and work across platforms. They will also be able to easily scale performance to multiple GPUs in both workstation and cluster environments. Additionally, we will be able to solve problems where there is insufficient memory on the GPU to hold the entire problem. Other non-NASA domains where our technology is immediate applicable include, but is not limited to: molecular dynamics, financial analysis, and graphical ray tracing. All of these domains are easily expressible as interconnected tasks and therefor can prosper for all the aforementioned benefits.
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