Petascale computational systems

TLDR

A balanced cyberinfrastructure is necessary to meet growing data‑intensive scientific needs. The authors argue that funding agencies should allocate resources to support a balanced cyberinfrastructure that benefits the broadest scientific community, including tier‑1 petascale centers, tier‑2/3 centers, and balanced systems with petascale IO and networking. They propose allocating roughly half of funding agency resources to tier‑1 petascale centers and the other half to tier‑2/3 centers on a cost‑sharing basis, while also supporting balanced systems with petascale IO and networking.

Abstract

A balanced cyberinfrastructure is necessary to meet growing data-intensive scientific needs. We believe that available resources should be allocated to benefit the broadest cross-section of the scientific community. Given the power-law distribution of problem sizes, this means that about half of funding agency resources should be spent on tier-1 centers at the petascale level and the other half dedicated to tier-2 and tier-3 centers on a cost-sharing basis. Funding agencies should support balanced systems, not just CPU farms, as well as petascale IO and networking. They should also allocate resources for a balanced tier-1 through tier-3 cyberinfrastructure.