How to talk new computers into working harder

In their 2008 Swiss Computer Science Challenge Award competition, the Hasler Foundation asks applicants to identify current grand challenges in computer science. In this current submission, we discuss how novel hybrid, heterogeneous high performance computing architectures as exemplified by IBM’s Roadrunner pose enormous usability and productivity problems to programmers and users. We argue that addressing these difficulties is important as this kind of architectures will become more popular not only in high-end supercomputing but also in the mainstream. We show that significant advances are required in a variety of areas including programming models and languages, compilers, runtime systems, and debugging and performance analysis tools. In conclusion, the computer science community as a whole needs to undertake a collaborative effort to make hybrid computing more usable for real-world scientific applications and thus beneficial for society