Software for Exascale Computing: Some Remarks on the Priority Program SPPEXA

摘要

SPPEXA, the Priority Program 1648 "Software for Exa-scale Computing" of the German Research Foundation (DFG), was established in 2012. SPPEXA was DFG's first strategic Priority Program-strategic in the sense that it had been the initiative of DFG's board to suggest a larger and trans-disciplinary funding scheme to support the development of software at all levels that would be able to benefit from future exa-scale systems. A proposal had been formulated by a team of scientists representing domains across the STEM fields, evaluated in the standard format for Priority Programs, and financed via special funds. Operations started in January 2013, and after two 3-year funding phases and a cost-neutral extension, SPPEXA's activities will come to an end by end of April, 2020. A final international symposium took place on October 21-23, 2019, in Dresden, and this volume of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering-the second SPPEXA-related one after the corresponding report of Phase 1 (see Appendix 3 in [1])-contains reports of 16 out of 17 SPPEXA projects (the project ExaSolvers will deliver its report as a special issue of Springer's journal Computing and Visualization in Science) and is, thus, a comprehensive overview of research within SPPEXA.While each single project report emphasizes the respective project's individual research outcomes and, thus, provides one perspective of research in SPPEXA, this contribution, co-authored by the two scientific coordinators-Hans-Joachim Bungartz and Wolfgang E. Nagel-and by three of the four researchers that have served as program coordinator over the years-Philipp Neumann, Benjamin Uekermann, and Severin Reiz-emphasizes the program SPPEXA itself. It provides an overview of the design and implementation of SPPEXA, it highlights its accompanying and supporting activities (internationalization, in particular with France and Japan; workshops; doctoral retreats; diversity-related measures), and it provides some statistics. It, thus, complements the papers from SPPEXA's research consortia collected in this volume.