Science Driven Supercomputing Architectures: Analyzing Architectural Bottlenecks with Applications and Benchmark Probes

There is a growing gap between the peak speed of parallel computing systems and the actual delivered performance for scientific applications. In general this gap is caused by inadequate architectural support for the requirements of modern scientific applications, as commercial applications and the much larger market they represent, have driven the evolution of computer architectures. This gap has raised the importance of developing better benchmarking methodologies to characterize and to understand the performance requirements of scientific applications, to communicate them efficiently to influence the design of future computer architectures. This improved understanding of the performance behavior of scientific applications will allow improved performance predictions, development of adequate benchmarks for identification of hardware and application features that work well or poorly together, and a more systematic performance evaluation in procurement situations.