"Zen" and the art of petascale ocean modeling: a conceptual analysis of how virtualization could be key to bringing individual science back to petascale ocean modeling

• Authors: Chris Hill;Larry Rudolph
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on System-level virtualization for high performance computing
• Year: 2008

We speculate on a novel role virtualization could play in creating a rounded, balanced physical science and engineering software ecosystem to support petascale computational science. The motivation for this analysis is a quest for ways to engage a broader spectrum of expertise in state-of-the-art petascale modeling activities. Current generation petascale efforts are based around massively parallel systems with greater than 50,000 cores. This presents a considerable challenge to typical computational science and engineering application analysis and development practices. To illustrate the challenge we examine an ocean model deployed on a recently commissioned ≈60,000 core parallel system. This case study demonstrates interesting science and engineering challenges that many advanced simulations on petascale systems will face. We then describe a methodology, amenable to virtualization technology at various levels, that mitigates key aspects of the challenges outlined for a potentially broad class of applications.