As part of the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering 2023 (CSE23), the three SEA projects RED-SEA, IO-SEA and DEEP-SEA jointly organised a symposium titled “Focal Points of Software for European Exascale Architectures”.

DEEP-SEA project leader Estela Suarez opened the session, which took place on the second day of the conference, Monday 27 February. She gave an introduction to the topic and outlined the main issues related to exascale architectures.

Suarez noted that many of the challenges we currently face stem from hardware heterogeneity. She explained that, ideally, most of the hardware complexity should be handled by the middleware and software stack, while interfaces to applications should be hardware-agnostic and standardised. Professor Suarez then went on to explain the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA), which is the common ground in the three SEA projects, and explained how they are addressing the Exascale challenges in the MSA context.

This introduction was followed by three in-depth presentations:

• Gilles Moreau of CEA/RED-SEA spoke on “Next Generation Interconnects”;
• Philippe Deniel of CEA/IO-SEA took the audience through “Exascale I/O and storage systems”;
• Paul Carpenter of BSC/DEEP-SEA outlined the main software research directions in his talk on “Exascale System Software and Programming Models”.

The well-attended symposium concluded successfully with a question and answer session with wide public participation. To learn more about the event, please visit the conference Website.