Experiments in Sustainable Software Practices for Future Architectures

TL;DR

This paper discusses sustainable software practices for future architectures, highlighting their advantages and reporting on experimental projects at LANL to promote awareness of new programming approaches for emerging hardware.

Contribution

It introduces specific sustainable practices tailored for future architectures and presents experimental projects to raise awareness of innovative programming approaches.

Findings

Sustainable practices offer significant benefits for future architectures.

Experimental projects at LANL demonstrate the effectiveness of new programming approaches.

Awareness-raising efforts can facilitate adoption of sustainable software practices.

Abstract

In the process of rewriting large physics codes at Los Alamos National Laboratory to perform well on new architectures such as many-core, GPU, and Intel MIC, we have found a number of areas in which sustainable software practices can provide significant advantages. We describe several specific advantages of sustainable practices for future architectures, and report on two small experimental projects at LANL intended to raise awareness of new software practices and programming approaches for new architectures.