After some background on the sweeping changes happening in agricultural technology as a result of General Purpose Technologies, Mark will discuss how AI and IoT are merging on the farm, creating some compelling problems to be solved on the edge.

In the design of an advanced cyberinfrastructure platform (ACP), that involve sensors, edge devices, instruments, computing power in the cloud and HPC, a key aspect is how to describe the applications to be executed in such platform.
Very often these applications are not standalone, but involve a set of sub-applications or steps composing a workflow. The scientists then rely on effective environments to describe their workflows and engines to manage them in complex infrastructures.

COMPSs is a task-based programming model that enables the development of workflows that can be executed in parallel in distributed computing platform. The workflows that we currently support may involve different types of tasks, such as parallel simulations (MPI) or analytics (i.e., written in Python thanks to PyCOMPSs, the Python binding for COMPSs). COMPSs, through and storage interface, makes transparent the access to persistent data stored in key-value databases (Hecuba) or object-oriented distributed storage environments (dataClay).

While COMPSs has been developed from its early times for highly distributed environments, we have been extending it to deal with more challenging environments, with edge devices and components in the fog, that can appear and disappear.

The vision of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP), initiated in 2016 as a formal DOE project executing through 2023, is to accelerate innovation with exascale simulation and data science solutions that enhance U.S. economic competitiveness, strengthen our national security, and change our quality of life. ECP’s mission is to deliver exascale-ready applications and solutions that address currently intractable problems of strategic importance and national interest; create and deploy an expanded and vertically integrated software stack on DOE HPC exascale and pre-exascale systems, thereby defining the enduring US exascale ecosystem; and leverage U.S. HPC vendor research activities and products into DOE HPC exascale systems. The project is a joint effort of two DOE programs: the Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program and the National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. ECP’s RD&D activities are carried out by over 100 teams of scientists and engineers from the DOE national laboratories, universities, and U.S. industry. These teams have been working together since the fall of 2016 on the development of applications, software technologies, and hardware technologies and architectures:
Applications: Creating or enhancing the predictive capability of applications through algorithmic and software advances via co-design centers; targeted development of requirements-based models, algorithms, and methods; systematic improvement of exascale system readiness and utilization; and demonstration and assessment of effective software integration.
Software Technologies: Developing and delivering a vertically integrated software stack containing advanced mathematical libraries, extreme-scale programming environments, development tools, visualization libraries, and the software infrastructure to support large-scale data management and data science for science and security applications.
Hardware and Integration: Supporting U.S. HPC vendor R&D focused on innovative architectures for competitive exascale system designs; objectively evaluating hardware designs; deploying an integrated and continuously tested exascale software ecosystem at DOE HPC facilities; accelerating application readiness on targeted exascale architectures; and training on key ECP technologies to accelerate the software development cycle and optimize productivity of application and software developers.
Illustrative examples will be given on how the ECP teams are delivering in these three areas of technical focus, with specific emphasis on recent work on the world’s #1 supercomputer, namely the Summit leadership system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.