A design proposal for a next generation scientific software framework

Abstract

High performance scientific software has many unique and challenging characteristics. These codes typically consist of many different stages of computation with different algorithms and components with diverse requirements. These heterogeneous algorithms, coupled with platform heterogeneity, create serious performance challenges. To retain performance, portability and maintainability of the software on heterogeneous platforms, more abstractions have to be integrated into the software design. Most of these abstractions are still in the research stage and scientific codes have barely started using them. However, it is urgent that we start considering the abstraction interplay in designing the next generation of software architecture. We propose a software architecture for PDE-based scientific codes that combines three abstractions in a code framework suitable for expected heterogeneity in platforms, while retaining separation of concerns, performance and portability of the software. We support our proposal with an example design for an adaptive mesh refinement based framework.