Below are a set of 10 questions that will be discussed at the ISC’12 BoF. Please feel free to browse the questions, discuss your thoughts on any of them, and share this page or any question pages through social media.

1. In what ways will it be possible for a runtime software system to increase useful parallelism?
2. How can a future runtime system reduce latency or its effects?
3. What means are available through runtime techniques to significantly diminish overhead or its effects?
4. Are there approaches by which runtime system software could mitigate the effects of contention for shared resources?
5. Will runtime systems need to provide adequate resilience for Exascale?
6. Can runtime system software contribute to significant reduction of power consumption?
7. Will the use of runtime system for extreme scale parallel computers require new programming models, languages, and compilers?
8. Can runtime systems simplify programmability and/or debugability?
9. What will be the relationship and differentiation between runtime and operating systems?
10. Are there other roles for runtime system software in future highly scalable computer systems?

BoF Abstract:
One of the greatest changes in the field of supercomputing is likely to be the development and adoption of innovative runtime system software to greatly improve efficiency and greatly increase scalability. Runtime systems will be essential to achieving practical operation and programming of Exascale computing systems by the end of this decade. Not only will runtime systems enable delivery of Exaflops performance, but they will also be essential for making them practical by bounding power consumption and providing resilience. This exciting birds-of-a-feather session will address many of the key issues related to the promise of future HPC runtime systems. An innovative approach will be taken to ensure audience participation throughout. Guiding questions will be formulated and posted at http://www.etinternational.com/isc_bof where participants may preview the discussion points, discuss online, and prepare their own ideas for consideration. Professor Thomas Sterling of Indiana University will give an introductory presentation and Dr. Rishi Khan of ET International will guide the audience discussion.