Preliminary design examination of the ParalleX system from a software and hardware perspective

Exascale systems, expected to emerge by the end of the next decade, will require the exploitation of billion-way par-allelism at multiple hierarchical levels in order to achieve the desired sustained performance. While traditional ap-proaches to performance evaluation involve measurements of existing applications on the available platforms, such a methodology is obviously unsuitable for architectures still at the brainstorming stage. The prediction of the future ma-chine performance is an important factor driving the design of both the execution hardware and software environment. A good way to start assessing the performance is to iden-tify the factors challenging the scalability of parallel appli-cations. We believe the root cause of these challenges is the incoherent coupling between the current enabling technolo